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StarCraft Is Now Free, Nearly 20 Years After Its Release (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game -- plus the Brood War expansion -- for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would've cost $10-15 bucks. The company says they've also used this opportunity to improve the game's anti-cheat system, add "improved compatibility" with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and fix a few long lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison -- so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right?
Seems like yesterday the wife was bitching and moaning about how much time I spent playing that game. I'm getting old, fast.
I'm jazzed about having something compatible with newer versions of windows. As of Windows 7 I had to write a batch file to kill explorer in order to get it to work.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
I have the original SC for Mac and it's an OS9 PPC program and doesn't run on OS X (anymore, they did away with Classic mode after 10.4).
I'd love to see them make an emulator or compilation for Intel OS X.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Why? They are still planning on using portions of the code for the updated version, plus they are under no obligation to do so. They've already given away the game for free. Asking for the source now, just after they've released it for free, is pushing an agenda too far. Calm your crusade for a few hours, at least. Sheesh.
You must be loads of fun at parties.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
The GPL does not change copyright law.... you always need permission from the copyright holder of a work to copy it, and the GPL does not change that. The GPL outlines the prerequisites a person is expected to adhere to in order to gain such permission. If you are the sole copyright holder, you can GPL your own work and still make closed-source derivative works of it, since you cannot infringe upon your own copyright. If you are not the only copyright holder, then of course, you cannot do this, because to copy the work you still need permission from all of the copyright holders, and without contacting each one individually and obtaining specific permission to copy the work under different terms, the terms of the GPL would apply by default.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's the dumbest comment I've seen today. Nobody ever took C&C seriously as a competitive game, and Warcraft 3 was less popular than its own mods. Starcraft has been played at a professional level for the entire 20 year run.
Might depend on the party I suppose. Little "f" free is like someone giving you a free beer, big "F" free is like someone giving you a recipe for beer. The former you can consume just once, the later you can improve on and consume forever.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Warcraft (1994) predated Command and Conquer (1995). Command and Conquer was much more a reskin of Dune than Warcraft is a reskin of C&C.
It's also kind of silly to pretend any of these games is as historically important as Starcraft. People are still playing and watching competitive Starcraft.
If you're going to be a contrarian fanboy pedant, at least get your facts right, or try to make some kind of point.
There are still thousands of people playing SC1 online at any given time, 20 years after its release. EA already shut down the servers for most of the Command and Conquer games years ago.
He doesn't get invited to those - i.e. any - sort of parties.
The GPL enforces freedom, while MIT/BSD licenses do not.
I've often used the term "careless licenses" to describe MIT and BSD, because the authors of software under such licenses don't care how it's used. With the GPL, in contrast, they are requiring that you keep derivatives open-source as well.
That is the main freedom the GPL is concerned about: the freedom to view, modify, and use the source code for the software you run. Not only does the GPL require the author to release source code, but it requires redistributors to do the same, ensuring that that very specific freedom endures. On the other hand, MIT/BSD licenses are little more than a disclaimer of warranty, allowing unscrupulous enterprises to rebuild the software and sell it as a commercial product, effectively taking credit for the original author's work - which the SCOTUS has found to be of significant economic value.
In short, it's a matter of perspective. The GPL protects the users and original author by adding restrictions, while the MIT/BSD licenses protect nothing while requiring nothing. To an author, it is a matter of preference what they care about most.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It wouldn't be a mistake to release a work under the GPL if the author still did not want others to make derivative works without permission. Given that they didn't release the source code at all, that is likely to be the case..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Some of us were posting on slashdot before there was an "open source community."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
and Warcraft 3 was less popular than its own mods
I think you mean mod, singular, and DOTA is just a mash up of Warcraft 3's heroes and Tower Defense. But the mod wouldn't have made sense at all without Warcraft 3's hero system (kill npc creeps, level up abilities, and get an utlimate). That is what MOBAs are really based on more than any other single element, and it was a direct contribution by the WC3 design team.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Allowing people freedom requires preventing people from restricting others' freedom. Countries have laws, and they are often long. We can't accurately compare the freedom of countries by comparing how long their laws are.
Besides, much of the GPL (aside from the requirement to disclose source) is designed to counter the requirements in copyright laws (which are generally very long, and full of restrictions and limitations).
OpenRA managed make C&C competitive, I really recommend that you take a look.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
https://opensource.org/history
The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code.
Seriously, just do the world a favour and kill yourself.
The GPL's negative effect on freedom
Nope. The government stepping in and putting you in jail for lynching undesireables is a "negative effect on freedom" but is still a net gain in freedom. "Forcing" freedom is still more freedom than anarchy. In practice, anarchy quickly becomes a warlord system. So GPL, forcing those who use it to remain open isn't a negative effect on freedom.
Unless you think that putting a mass murderer in prison is a negative effect on freedom.
Learn to love Alaska
I seem to remember someone talking about the code being absolutely abysmal
From a quick google search: http://kotaku.com/5942128/star...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
GPL would normally only cover the source. But right now the whole thing is freeware. I remember when Quake 1 when GPL, but we were still not allowed to include assets outside of the shareware release. It took a long time for decent total conversions to come out, and we realized that just having the source to a game didn't really mean as much as we had assumed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I found this headline confusing, because when I started out here on Slashdot many of us used "free" to mean "available under a license that preserves your freedom to view source code, modify, and redistribute for any purpose" rather than merely "gratis."
There doesn't seem to be a license or source code available, so I'm thinking the article just means available with no charge.
Non-alcoholic version:
Free as in liberty, not socialism.
Quake 1 isn't nearly as popular as StarCraft though. I remember playing a Gundam TC that worked with the Broodwar expansion, so even if they don't release assets, there'd be a few versions of alternative assets ready to go on day 1.
On an unrelated note, the source code will probably be a good educational tool for people trying to study video game programming.
gl, hf
The label was created at a strategy session of the community that already existed.
Whatever. Dune II predates it.
DotA is definitely more than a mash-up of Warcraft 3 and Tower Defense, I mean it spawned an entire genre that has dominated gaming for the better part of 10-years.
Seriously I have never even played it. It came out after I had already reached peak gaming in my lifetime.
I'm installing it now and will soon see what all the fuss is about.
I feel like this guy except I'm on a nearly 20 year lag.
I suppose I'll get around to Half Life 2 by the time I start drawing Social Security
Starcraft gave me my first taste of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Every day 8 hours CAD, 10 hours Starcraft. Hurt like a bitch after a few months. I had to give up the Starcraft for about 3 months and mouse left handed at work.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
He doesn't get invited to those - i.e. any - sort of parties.
With a Free licensed party he could just compile his own!
No, it's because some of the people who worked for Blizzard and wrote the original Starcraft code aren't at Blizzard anymore but still have ownership of those snippits of code. Remember how the industry used to be? Where code sections you wrote would remain under your power, as a part of your employment at the company? That's the reason why. They can't release to source code without permission from those people.
Hell just look at the clusterfuck with things like NOLF or SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division and so on. Nobody has any idea who even owns the source code let alone the IP anymore, but IP laws are such a mess that even in that state they can't release what source code they do have. It's a good argument on the need to reform various laws on IP protection though.
Om, nomnomnom...
there is
There are
at least 40 definitions for the word free
"free"
in the dictionary,
dictionary.
its
It's
no one elses
else's
fault or problem you
that you
are to
too
fucking stupid to remember more than one
one.
Sorry, why were you saying he was stupid? I was a bit distracted.
A bad knockoff of 'Command and Conquer' is historically important?
And C&C was 'just' a knockoff of Dune 2?
Hell 'Warcraft' was a bad knockoff of 'C&C', starcraft was just a bad reskin of warcraft.
IIRC, that's how SC started, but they had to do a whole new engine eventually when they decided to do more than a 'knockoff'. Cloaking, stacking, burrowing, creep, higher ground advantage, floating buildings, add-ons, regeneration, etc could not be done as a warcraft reskin.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The fact that the GPL "requires" people to do so many things means that it's taking away freedom.
Whose freedom? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee 100% freedom to each of them simultaneously. They are incompatible. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So, it makes no sense simply to state that a license "reduces freedom in general". So, let's please stop saying imprecisely wrong things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because it puts restrictions on the way I can redistribute it". The GPL has always been about protecting the freedoms of the end-users at all cost, not the the vendors' freedoms.
I'll wait for the Linux port. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The PC link is broken - it only leads to a Windows .exe file, so it won't run on my PC. Yeah, alright, I'm trying to be unreasonable here, but it would be nice if at least those who are supposedly in the know (one would hope this includes the editors of /.) when it comes to computers and technology, would stop equating PC (=the hardware platform) with Windows (the OS, for lack of a better word), since there are things out there that definitely are PCs which do not run Windows.
Funny.
I was around before you and that "Free" with a capital-F shite was either done in jest or not taken seriously for years.
Sometimes, to secure the freedom of the many, you have to somewhat reduce the freedom of the few. The GPL secures the freedom of users (the many), to do so, it must somewhat reduce the freedom of programmers (the few).
This is not tyranny, this is freedom - when you increase the favour of the few at the expense of the many, that is tyranny (and why libertarianism in all it's forms is tyranical).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yet it is the most popular open-source license by far, and has given us the infrastructure for the entire internet, powered some of the biggest supercomputers ever built which are helping to solve the mysteries of the universe and so on and so forth.
The BSD systems, even after release, and despite being arguably better in some technical measures never achieved such an impact on the world, their biggest achievement was having MacOSX based on FreeBSD. Sure the GPL precluded what apple did there - and that was why apple chose FreeBSD - but the BSD Licenses failed to build an open internet for the masses or an OS that runs most of it's servers (and a growing number of desktops and virtually all of it's mobile devices).
The GPL succeeded where the BSD licenses failed exactly because it understood that to make society, overall, more free you must REDUCE the freedom of the few in favour of the freedom of the many. Because when you do not, the few will use their freedom to remove freedom from the many - they will BECOME tyrants.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Sean Spicer seems to think we can - remember he told us Ryandontcare was better because it was shorter.
And it WAS better, if you're a billionaire, for everybody else it was basically getting raped and being told they charge extra if you want lube.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It is illegal to dissasemble and modify freeware, so GPL software is not worse there.
Yes you can. If you don't modify it, you can simply copy the offer that was handed to you as your user right. (GPLv3, section 6c). Please don't spread misinformation. (Section 6c is limited to a noncommercial context, but that is the use case you were arguing, and the only possible one with shareware/freeware).
If you did modify it, well, that's already something that you couldn't have done legally with freeware.
You can't do that with freeware either, so how is it any better?
Myself, I like to see it with respect to what is protected by the license in terms of freedom.
- "Permissive" licenses (BSD-like) protect a single snapshot of the code, as it exists the day it is released. That version can be used freely by anyone, but the possibility to impose additional restrictions means that you won't necessarily be free to use the versions derived from that snapshot.
- "Protective" licenses (i.e. Copyleft) protect the whole project in the long term, whether it is the snapshot released under the license or any later modification of it. You are guaranteed access to any version that someone releases of that code, under the same terms that give you the freedom to use code.
The idea of the constraints in Copyleft is that the constrained environment should have more total possible actions in the aggregate, even if every individual player has one less action available on paper. If you don't acknowledge this possibility, you are not getting the point why the constraint was added to this kind of license.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Ok, I'll bite. Why not the GPL? What is there that you'd want to do with the code and the GPL wouldn't allow you?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
No, it's because some of the people who worked for Blizzard and wrote the original Starcraft code aren't at Blizzard anymore but still have ownership of those snippits of code. Remember how the industry used to be? Where code sections you wrote would remain under your power, as a part of your employment at the company?
No. Never. The Starcraft developers were Blizzard employees. Blizzards Inc owns and controls all code. Employees got paychecks in the typical "work for hire" manner that transfers copyright to the company.
The source code is not being released because it is partly still in use. The game engine is the same code in the upcoming 4K display compatible release, which is network/gameplay compatible with this free version. Its only the graphics code that is changing.
No. You can not GPL your own code and make proprietary binaries. The terms of the GPL require everyone, including the original copyright holder, to provide source to anyone they gave a binary to and grant these people the right to modify and redistribute to their hearts content.
To create a proprietary version the original copyright holder has to dual license. Have two copies of their source code, one under GPL and one under something proprietary compatible. Only binaries built from the non-GPL version of the source code can remain proprietary.
I found this headline confusing
Don't worry, we understand Stallman. You'll get used to the common usage of the word eventually.
I found this headline confusing, because when I started out here on Slashdot many of us used "free" to mean "available under a license that preserves your freedom to view source code, modify, and redistribute for any purpose" rather than merely "gratis."
Well, no. Free still means both gratis and libre. When the word appears at the beginning of a sentence like that, it's difficult to tell which meaning is intended, because the opportunity to capitalize it for emphasis vanishes. You don't get to define the word for the world, and it would be stupid if we were to use the word so differently from everyone else. That would isolate us and make us even less relatable.
"Free Software" means what you want free to mean, but only among nerds. "Free" can mean a lot of things. One of them is libre, and you will find very few takers for changing that, because it would be dumb.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The âoeopen sourceâ label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code.
No, that is a lie, and you should not repeat it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, but S3M and XM are still superior formats.
#DeleteFacebook
Forgot to take your meds this morning?
#DeleteFacebook
Will I require more vespene gas?
Have I enough minerals?
Must I construct additional pylons?
And what about supply depots, are additional supply depots required?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I'm curious by what measure you consider GPL to be the most popular license. In my experience GPL is rare outside of the Linux community, MIT seems to be the most common on the web and Apache for everything else.
After Blizzard attacked the bnetd developers, I swore I would never buy, or even play, another Blizzard game. At that point, Blizzard became an evil company.
That still stands.
I won't even entertain the notion of putting one byte of Blizzard code on my system.
Does distributing the original game even matter when developers can take the source and create something awesome from it?
There are free games built on those engines, like Nexuiz, Reaction, Tremulous, etc... You just need to look.
It's been studied repeatedly - there are simply far more open source projects under the GPL-family of licenses than any other license. That implies it is chosen by more free/open source developers than any other license - which makes it the most popular.
You could argue that something like the apache license is used on projects more people use than many GPL projects - but it's used on far fewer projects, so it's definitely less popular with developers. There are specific niches where the GPL lacks popularity - usually areas where FOSS and small-scale proprietory software frequently co-exist and have a good mutually beneficial relationship - indy games for example, where there is generally strong pressure on FOSS indy-devs to use the MIT license so that their assets can be used by proprietory indy-games devs - and the return for that is that they get to use a lot of the art assets from those proprietory devs under things like the C.C. licenses. In those environments a GPL project tends to struggle to attract volunteers since most of the people who may volunteer to work on your free game are probably working on a game of their own which may not be free and they would want to be able to reuse some of your work in return for contributing to your project.
But those are small niches - and tend to be notable in that the companies doing proprietory work are tiny (often one-man) shops which can negotate with the FOSS projects on equal terms - there isn't much fear among the FOSS guys that their code would be used in some major proprietory project with a huge marketing budget that actually displaces them and gives the users ONLY the non-free version. The Apple/FreeBSD rip-off is unlikely there.
Indeed, the ONLY time I've EVER done a FOSS project under any licence other than the GPL was a games project- due to the nature of the indy+foss game community and how the two communities overlap and interact.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It's actually a perfectly accurate analogy. Getting the recipe ALLOWS you to make your own beer, it doesn't REQUIRE you to do so.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
As has been already described above, the freedom that the GPL offers is that the amount of freedom that anyone has is never reduced... you suggest that you can make a non-free version without reducing the freeom because you allege that the free version is available somewhere... but what if you either already own or buy out the infrastructure that was being used to distribute it? You didn't own the original copyright, but if you control the communication infrastructure by which the author provided it to you, then you have the means to prevent further distribution of the original, and while that may be unethical, it certainly isn't illegal. Nothing in the BSD license stops you from preventing other people from accessing the content where you got it from, so it leaves a loophole with which companies or people wiht sufficient resources can still reduce the amount of freedom that people have with the work without violating any copyright law, while the GPL ensures that reducing any amount of freedom of the work results in a copyright violation. While you might still be able to suffocate a GPL work in the same way, you would not legally be able to make any copies of the work or create derivative works without infringing on copyright, so there can be no net benefit for anyone to do so.
Copyright says that unless fair use is deterrmined to apply (and derivative works are *never* fair use), you can't make a copy of a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder. The GPL does not change that, it simply grants such permission to anyone who agrees to its terms. Yes, the GPL limits what you can do, but in fact copyright has already done that anyways, so your limitations are actually no greater under the GPL than they would be on a non-free work. The GPL only ensures that you pass along the same freedoms that you were given to those that you distribute it to. Nothing more, nothing less.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's been studied repeatedly
So where's your cites to any of these studies?
there are simply far more open source projects under the GPL-family of licenses than any other license. That implies it is chosen by more free/open source developers than any other license - which makes it the most popular.
Oh really?
1 MIT 44.69%
2 Other 15.68%
3 GPLv2 12.96%
4 Apache 11.19%
5 GPLv3 8.88%
6 BSD 3-clause 4.53%
7 Unlicense 1.87%
8 BSD 2-clause 1.70%
9 LGPLv3 1.30%
10 AGPLv3 1.05%
There are lots of books on video game programming. And GP Gems has an article on how Starcraft-like RTSs work.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/201...
The very first link if you google it, is to the most comprehensive study that exists - and the most up to date data. And it clearly shows that the GPL2 is still by far the most popular license with GPL3 in second place - combined they cover a full 37% of all projects by themselves -the remaining 63% divided among ALL OTHER licenses - including the other GNU copyleft licences like the AGPL.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
DotA is definitely more than a mash-up of Warcraft 3 and Tower Defense, I mean it spawned an entire genre that has dominated gaming for the better part of 10-years.
Why do you think its popularity and longevity preclude it from being a combination of derivative ideas?
Games like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch are also very popular, and TF2 has had a very long life indeed. But their core concepts were still spawned from a Quake mod called Team Fortress that was really just another Capture the Flag clone (of which there were many in those days) with classes. It's just that it was done very well and arrived at the right time to become very popular.
The original version of DotA WAS a Warcraft 3 mod which was based on a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of Strife. And Aeon of Strife was an evolution of the (at the time) very popular Tower Defense sub-genre.
DotA is popular and has continued to evolve, but it's still a derivative work. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's fun to play and continues to innovate. It just means it didn't form in a vacuum.
I wonder... Will it be like it used to? Bnet being home to BGH/Fastest Map/UMS pub games and private servers being where any serious competition is at? Must not have logged on this game in at least 5-6 years, but hopefully nothing changed much in that regard. Pretty excited for the hi-res version, this is THE game that kept my childhood sane.
I tend to rant.
DotA is definitely more than a mash-up of Warcraft 3 and Tower Defense, I mean it spawned an entire genre that has dominated gaming for the better part of 10-years.
What I mean is that if you had only ever played League of Legends, your first time playing WC3, the first time you trained a hero from the altar, you'd just get why the genre was born out of that game. But yes I agree DOTA is a far better game than WC3/TFT and was a really ingenious distillation of its best parts along with new additions.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Well, this is pretty cool I suppose. I doubt there are many people out there who haven't played it yet and are thinking "Yay, finally I can enjoy Starcraft!" -- but this will drum up support for their new Starcraft: Remastered product, which is what's of real interest here. Also, as a gamer in his 30's, I'm forgetting the younger generation who may not have even bothered with a 20 year old RTS from Blizzard. I remember being completely blown away when SC came out, having only seen Warcraft's older engine, seeing SC in all of its glory was amazing. Even the music is great. The graphics don't exactly amaze anymore (but neither did SC2), but that's what the Remastered project is for.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
What about local LAN play? Blizzard ruined the entire franchise for me when they took away local play options.
I realize it's hard for a lot of people to imagine now-a-days, especially Blizzard management, but there are in fact several scenarios where not having to route through the internet is beneficial, if not a requirement.
The very first link if you google it,
The first link I found when I googled it was the one I posted. It also contradicts your study.
is to the most comprehensive study that exists
By what metric? And I've never heard of "Black Duck", but everybody knows about GitHub.
and the most up to date data
The GitHub study was from March 2015, the Black Duck study from November 2014.
And it clearly shows that the GPL2 is still by far the most popular license with GPL3 in second place
But not in the GitHub study, and more importantly, there's a point of agreement that you brazenly try to spin in your favor:
combined they cover a full 37% of all projects by themselves -the remaining 63% divided among ALL OTHER licenses - including the other GNU copyleft licences like the AGPL
Yeah, that's your spin. The real story is that, collectively, the permissive licenses (BSD, Apache, and MIT) outnumber the GPL variants, and that's been the trend. From your own link:
"If we group both versions (2 and 3) of the GPL together, the GPL is in use within 37% of the Black Duck surveyed projects. The three primary permissive license choices (Apache/BSD/MIT), on the other hand, collectively are employed by 42%."
Dude... stop advertising your lack of experience. 90% or more of active FOSS projects were founded before github ever existed - mostly decades before. Github represents such a tiny sample size its ridiculous to extrapolate from it. All the latesr sexy projects are there - but thats useless for this question. And we who have experience in FOSS have known black duck for decades
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Dude... stop advertising your lack of experience.
And stop advertising your disregard for facts.
90% or more of active FOSS projects were founded before github ever existed - mostly decades before.
Oh look, another unsubstantiated claim from you. New projects are being created all the time. And even many old projects have moved to GitHub.
Github represents such a tiny sample size its ridiculous to extrapolate from it.
I didn't find the number of projects for either study, so this is another unsubstantiated claim on your part. However, I can substantiate a simple Google metric:
Search results for "github" "software": About 50,200,000 results
Search results for "black duck" "software": About 286,000 results
All the latesr sexy projects are there - but thats useless for this question.
Maybe you should stop living in the past and assuming nothing has changed significantly since then.
And we who have experience in FOSS have known black duck for decades
And more importantly, maybe you should look at the results from your own Black Duck link. Even that one agrees that, collectively, permissive licenses are winning out over GPL, and that's the trend.
But hey, maybe you think IE is still the number one browser, smart phones are a luxury that can be ignored as a niche product, and gosh darn it, Black Duck and GPL rule the roost of the open source world, because, decades!
it would say NOTHING about my actual claim
Tired of embarrassing yourself, so posting as Anonymous Coward now?
that the GPL built the infrastructure for the open internet
Oh, you mean like Apache, OpenSSL, and the BSD network stack?
And the claim that I was responding to was this: "It's been studied repeatedly - there are simply far more open source projects under the GPL-family of licenses than any other license. That implies it is chosen by more free/open source developers than any other license - which makes it the most popular."
And even your own study, the one that shows GPL in the best light, proved you wrong.
Oh and black duck is not a source hosting site - your comparative search is false, but even so their sample size was 6 times larger than github -and INCLUDES github.
You again make unsubstantiated claims. I did not find the number of projects in either study, so where do you get this "6 times" number from? Regardless, your claim was proven wrong when looking at either study.
Bullshit. The GPL is about freedom; the difference is that it treats freedom as a positive right while things like the BSD license treat it as a negative right.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I tried installing it twice after following the recommendations on the forums and all I get is:
"This application encountered an unexpected error" with a mysterious error code.
Reading through the mysterious failures to work and the various things that patch 1.18 breaks on the forum is depressing.
I found this headline confusing, because when I started out here on Slashdot many of us used "free" to mean "available under a license that preserves your freedom to view source code, modify, and redistribute for any purpose" rather than merely "gratis."
Well, no. Free still means both gratis and libre. When the word appears at the beginning of a sentence like that, it's difficult to tell which meaning is intended, because the opportunity to capitalize it for emphasis vanishes. You don't get to define the word for the world, and it would be stupid if we were to use the word so differently from everyone else. That would isolate us and make us even less relatable.
"Free Software" means what you want free to mean, but only among nerds. "Free" can mean a lot of things. One of them is libre, and you will find very few takers for changing that, because it would be dumb.
Well, I didn't argue that the word has only one correct definition, and I certainly agree that many of us including myself aren't very relatable, and those of us who use/used "free" to mean "libre" are certainly less so.
Everything I said is a statement of fact: some, but not all of us, back in the day used to use "free software" to mean something specific, and I got confused when I saw this headline because I briefly thought that's what it meant. Times sure have changed here if I'm the only one that's true for, and that gives me a bit of nostalgia for Slashdot back in the day, warts and unrelatable nerds and all.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The new graphics aren't making the original look "ancient by comparison." It looks a little better, but it's really not a huge difference. There's a Blizzard trailer with comparisons.
> like how StarCraft developers dis-obeyed Microsoft orders to not release on NT 4 because it was a serious Operating System.
You wouldn't happen to have a source for that by chance? Thanks.
Touche. Yes, my bad for overgeneralizing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>Oh, you mean like Apache, OpenSSL, and the BSD network stack?
You just listed pretty much the TOTATILITY of the internet infrastructure that's NOT GPL - the thousands of other projects that form part of that infrastructure is a different story - not to mention the OS that nearly all of them ran on, the OS and development tools they were created and built and compiled with, the support libraries they used, the shell they ran in... these were almost all GPL.
>Regardless, your claim was proven wrong when looking at either study.
No, the blackduck study clearly shows that, although GPL popularity has declined somewhat in recent years it was still the most popular license by a massive margin.
And your counter-argument is that more new projects were founded (with all or nearly all not using the GPL) in the last 7 years than in the preceding 24 years since the GPL was first published ! For most of that time the ONLY projects that did NOT use it were basically those created at Berkeley (which didn't even get released until 10 years later) and those from MIT. The most influential of the latter being X - which the vast majority of people did not receive as free software exactly because of it's permissive license - it didn't become available to most people as an open-source project until the original release of XFree86 in 1992.
And the point is - you accuse me of living in the past, while ignoring that we were discussing HISTORY - you know, the past. The present is not particularly relevant, and even in the present the statement is still true- just slightly less so. Now it's entirely possible it will not be true in future, this would be tragic, but it's possible -and the trends suggests the possibility is quite strong. But that has nothing to do with today.
Github based on some browsing is the most popular hosting site today - but there is no indication of how many projects are active (of my 6 projects there only one is active - so by your reasoning we can divide it by six) - the other ones have fewer projects but some like Savannah have a significantly higher percentage of active projects. Bitbucket doesn't even reveal numbers - but their high popularity with companies using the Atlassian stack suggests it will be quite high. There's the whole stack over at FreeDesktop.org.
Github may be a major player - but they are not the only player in town, and they remain a recent addition to the stable - just 7 years old, when we're discussing a period dating back to 1983.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And, again, blackduck is not a hosting site - you can't just compare google hits as if that tells you something - all that tells you is how many pages link to them. Blackduck is a software company specialising in analytical research software - and it so happens that one of the ways they prove their code is running comparative studies of license popularity - the most comprehensive studies of their kind there is. The data from github is PART of the input data they use, but their data even includes all those little projects still living on an FTP server somewhere that ever even got moved to a codehosting site... you know, like the fucking kernel.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can do that with GPL code. All they need to care about is taken care in the copy of the license bundled with the binary package (that you'd need to pass around with MIT code too).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
You just listed pretty much the TOTATILITY of the internet infrastructure that's NOT GPL
There's more, but what I listed was a significant portion of Internet infrastructure, in contradiction to your ridiculous claim that GPL "has given us the infrastructure for the entire internet". And for somebody that claims experience, you also don't seem to understand that the Internet was around and flourishing before there was even a GPL operating system, or that the rise of Linux was partially an accident of history due to the legal tangles of BSD with AT&T.
No, the blackduck study clearly shows that, although GPL popularity has declined somewhat in recent years it was still the most popular license by a massive margin.
You made a claim about the "GPL-family of licenses". When you compare the permissive family (BSD, MIT, and Apache) with the GPL family, the permissive licenses come out on top. Developers are choosing permissive over GPL, even in your preferred study. If I go with the GitHub study GPL isn't even the most popular license, period.
And the point is - you accuse me of living in the past, while ignoring that we were discussing HISTORY - you know, the past.
No, we are discussing the present day breakdown of license choice. Your claim was about the present, which includes old history and recent history.
(of my 6 projects there only one is active - so by your reasoning we can divide it by six)
What the fuck? Don't assign your sloppy and muddled reasoning to me. If you have concrete numbers, like I've been asking for all along, then provide them. You don't.
Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally!
I found this headline confusing, because when I started out here on Slashdot many of us used "free" to mean
"Free Software" means what you want free to mean,
Everything I said is a statement of fact: some, but not all of us, back in the day used to use "free software" to mean something specific,
Your logical fallacy is: moving the goalposts. You were wrong. Admit you were wrong, and move on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm just a really dense unrelatable guy, because I don't get what I said that was wrong. Was I incorrect when I stated that I was at first confused? Was I incorrect when I said a lot of nerds her used to use "free software" to mean something other than "without cost"?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I worded my original post very carefully so that I wasn't saying what the word "free" does or does not mean, or should mean, or what other people should think, or anything like that. I'm not sure people are looking at my actual wording - I think they are reading something extra into what I said that isn't there.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Many open source projects have either moved to Github or have mirrors there (by the authors or by random people)
Considering TCP/IP was actually a BSD development, it's pretty fair to say the " infrastructure for the entire internet" is actually a result of BSD, not the GPL.
Since this basically destroy the false premise of your argument, the rest of your argument is pretty much bat guano.
The BSD license succeeded exactly where the GPL failed. It makes knowledge available freely and unrestricted. Because if this, it is much easier for a commercial entity to adopt. Once adopted, it is often advantages to help develop major architectural changes upstream, benefiting the entire community.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Sorry, no.
There are lots of software that make up the infrastructure of the internet, not one little protocol implementation.
And you're claim is bullshit too. It's true that the particular tcp/ip stack which is in most OS's today is based on the one that was in the BSD kernel - but that was not the origin of it. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented TCP/IP in 1972. At that stage Unix was a freshly released AT&T product. Work on BSD unixes wouldn't even start until the 1980s.
So it's bullshit to claim TCP/IP is *the* infrastructure of the internet (it's just one small part of a large bunch of things that form part of that) - it's even bigger bullshit to claim it was a BSD invention - it was not.
And the version of the code that does the vast majority of the work on the internet - is, in fact, the GPLd version inside the Linux kernel - which has been so extensively hacked on over the past more than 25 years as to be hardly recognisable anyway.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *