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LastCalc Is Open Sourced
Sanity writes "LastCalc is a cross between Google Calculator, a spreadsheet, and a powerful functional programming language, all with a robust and flexible heuristic parser. It even lets you write functions that pull in data from elsewhere on the web. It's all wrapped up in a JQuery-based user interface that does as-you-type syntax highlighting. Today, LastCalc's creator, Ian Clarke (Freenet, Revver), has announced that LastCalc will be open sourced under the GNU Affero General Public License 'to accelerate development, spread the workload, and hopefully foster a vibrant volunteer community around the project.'"
For those who are curious what Freenet is: It's a distributed data store, which is censorship-resistant and allows to publish information anonymously.
This is compelling but the use of Affero for the license makes onerous demands of the user. The implicit threat of a code audit is there.
Can you elaborate? Which clauses specifically make onerous demands?
The demands are only onerous to someone who is looking for code to run on a server as a service without having to make changes available. It's a good license that accomplishes what some authors want. Personally I prefer the BSD license for code I write, because I don't demand others share their changes unless they wish to. But not all authors wish to offer that choice, as they want changes to be shared. I really don't see the BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL vs AGLP battles so many developers get involved in. Each offers freedoms and responsibilities, a different menu with each license. The author gets to choose. And the user of the code can choose to agree and use the code, meeting the obligations required, or choose not to use it. So simple, so easy.
I won't be using LastCalc because I don't want to bother having to deal with the required responsibilities. If I wish to develop an application with that sort of functionality, I will likely write the code myself from scratch and share it BSD-style. Choices. I like having them. I'm grateful that others offer me open source choices. I'm glad that I have such a wide palette of choices to choose as a developer and as a code user.
Yeah, you're confusing it with a recursive function definition, I've been meaning to fix that. I guess I'll fire up Eclipse (it's Java, not Lisp)
Ok, just for you I risked borking the site during a slashdotting and I implemented a quick fix. You're welcome :-)
Being a user doesn't, but hosting it does. That's the difference between the GPL and AGPL.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Calculators should be multi-line like this - it's so much easier to keep track of calculations. Similar to LastCalc is InstaCalc on the web and something on the Mac called Soulver which is also very impressive.
Shameless plug: I've been working tirelessly on something like this too for almost a year, and apart from lists and a couple of other minor features, is a bit like LastCalc on steroids:
OpalCalc (for Windows currently).
The screenshots should give an idea of what it can do, but to name a few things: it's even more like notepad, faster, can handle times/dates, and allow words in the sum (like saying "5 oranges * £10 = £50" ).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Nah, just wanton irresponsibility :-)
Since you seem to know, can you give a brief description of the difference between AGPL, GPL, and MPL for us common folk please? there seem to be a shitzillion licenses out there but those 3 along with BSD (which is easy to follow, its pretty much a "give credit where credit is due" kinda thing) look to be the biggies but knowing what makes one different (and thus incompatible) from the others is hard to keep up with. I know MPL allows copyrighted images, is that the only difference? Is AGPL mainly focused on hosted code? Someone really should make a handy chart for those of us that aren't programmers by trade so we can easily spot the differences.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In other words, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who wish to violate that license and make unauthorized derivatives.
Wow, way to set up a straw man there.
Okay, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who want to violate the license. Tautology, so I'm hardly going to argue with it. But "in other words" implies that this is a reasonable paraphrase of the GP post, which this is not.
Some FLOSS licenses are a pain even for people who don't want to violate licenses. Suppose I want to include a library in a proprietary closed-source project. With some licenses, I can just do it. With BSD + "advertising clause", I now have an obligation to put text in my program, to put text in my manual, and possibly to put text on my web site and on a product package; I also have to keep track of whether I did the text or not, and make sure it isn't accidentally removed or altered. And I'll tell you right now: non-hypothetically, I avoid any license with an "advertising clause" for the above reason. With LGPL, I explicitly have to allow my customers to reverse-engineer my code, which would be a problem with a commercial product using licensed code (some licensed code requires one to take steps to prevent reverse-engineering).
So, a higher post in this thread claimed that the requirements of Affero GPL include an "auditing" clause, which potentially places an annoying burden on anyone who hosts the Affero GPL code. I haven't reviewed the Affero GPL so I don't know if this is correct, but I assume it is because you engaged in a straw-man attack rather than just pointing out an error.
So with a few examples I have shown that some licenses are more burdensome than others. In fact it is only people who do care about obeying licenses who are burdened; people who are just planning to violate the licenses can violate Affero GPL as easily as any other.
As to not seeing a "battle", that language overstates the case but you do probably see the differences among the licenses and you have apparently made your choice. Your choice is no more or less political than someone who chooses a strongly copylefted free software license such as the AGPL. Freedom of choice doesn't really explain anything. Choices are present in proprietary licenses too, thus highlighting how freedom of choice is a scam: The user's software freedoms are not respected nor is the open source development methodology present.
I have read this paragraph three times and I am not sure what you were trying to say here. If it is important, please restate.
"Freedom of choice doesn't explain anything"? What?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
AGPL is like GPL, but with the additional restriction that you must share source code to users when hosting it on a public-facing server, IIRC.
While not requiring modified source to be released might initially seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to.
Before the AGPL came out a BSD-licensed project of mine, webdiplomacy, was used to build a fork site.
They apparently forgot to credit us, are closed source, and didn't even include the BSD license until they were discovered. Instead of sharing code back they're quite bitter rivals, holding their site hostage for donations and having premium accounts.
Since the AGPL came out there are several other fork sites that have sprung up, but we all pool code changes, and they all market themselves to different niches (e.g. variants or different languages). Many of them are for-profit and host large communities, but we all share code and benefit from it.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
It would take a very comprehensive piece of surveying work to say whether this in fact holds across the board; but my anecdotal impression is that the utility of legally enforced compliance may vary depending on what sort of software you are dealing with.
The area that comes to mind is embedded systems: a substantial number of assorted plastic SoC boxes running linux are user-modifiable today because their sellers were forced to provide sources under the GPL. Their firmware was often of rather low quality; but contained vital architectural details about the hardware that would otherwise have had to be inferred by comparatively arduous reverse engineering. In those situations, motivation is still better(one presumes that the manufacturers who are shipping *WRT firmwares are probably more helpful than the ones who stash a passive_agressive_GPL_compliance_blob.rar file somewhere in the dark corner of their support site); but bad code that provided enough information to port the better mainline-based 3rd party firmware was still useful.
In something like the OGRE case, there doesn't seem to be the analogous vital information, bad code would just be bad code, making enforced contribution considerably less useful.
I'd be interested to see if this pattern in fact holds, or if I am simply mistaken, and if there are any other categories that push strongly in one direction or the other; but I don't really have enough information to say...