This could potentially impact how they recycle and reuse computers, especially the fact that Apple is providing free recycling for monitors, which usually cost $12 to recycle in any recycling place around the country.
I mean, they kind of did that with their bid of $3.14159 * 10^9 + 0i, right?
Just imagine what the accountants would have done if The Goog had tried to bid a non-trivial complex number.... probably just complained that they didn't have a column for "i" in their spreadsheet...:-)
Airprint, like so many Apple services, is a specific configuration of open-standard protocols, APIs, etc. that they've given a a proprietary name to, while trying to convince customers that they've created something unique and proprietary.
While I agree that there might be many Apple services that fit that bill, there are also other ones that have only basic support on things like Ubuntu because the protocols are (AFAIK) truly closed and proprietary, such as AirPlay.
The problem with a lot of these widgety things (whether from Apple or Microsoft or whomever), is that someone buys one of them and then requires all of their underlings (or sidelings, if they're just at the same level in the ladder) to use this item, often by downloading some proprietary programs or drivers. Most Windows and Mac users can't tell a command line from a chorus line, and most of any questions or concerns us geeky types have about this just goes *whoosh* right over their heads.
If AirPrint really is an open spec built on top of other open protocols, and if Apple is committed to putting at least a token bit of effort into interoperability with other deices, then that's really good. I'm always hesitant to use any "iProtocol" or "AirThisAndThat," based on my past experiences.
From lurking on the Meego lists it sounds like a number of the Nokians hacking on MeeGo and Qt shifted from working on Nokia's payroll to working on Intel's payroll. I believe that some of the teams even stayed in the same cities.
Intel isn't traditionally a mobile device developer, at least not memorably, so it will be interesting to see what Intel does with their new employees. Remember that MeeGo is intended for a number of different form factors (tablet, handheld, notebook, in-vehicle, etc...), so Intel might focus more on other devices and put less emphasis on creating MeeGo smartphones.
The 'BSD-like' license [google.com] Google chose is not right in my opinion. Companies like Microsoft could easily do an 'Embrace-->Extend-->Extinguish' game on the technology.
True, they *could*, although for the moment Microsoft is really jumping on the HTML5/standards wagon like crazy. Note: - The IE team is cranking through support for various HTML5 features, CSS, etc... - Windows 8 is apparently going to strongly support HTML5-based apps - Microsoft seemed okay with supporting WebM in IE as long as it was installed as a separate codec on the system (no promise yet of baking it in)
Also note that according to Wikipedia, marketshare for browsers in May 2011 is something like this:
Internet Explorer (43.5%)
Firefox (27.9%)
Google Chrome (16.8%)
Safari (7.3%)
Opera (2.2%)
Mobile browsers (5.8%)
At this point, if Chrome and Firefox team up on any web technology, they'll have equal marketshare with IE. If Opera and Safari join in, then they have a more than 10% advantage over IE.
This means that if IE tries to embrace/extend here, they'll have not only an uphill battle, but they might find themselves in a fight they can't win. End users will just download Firefox or Chrome and install that if YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever Hot and New website they're using stops working for them.
What is wrong with LGPL ver. 3?
Google likes permissive licenses. Such licenses allow Google and their Copyleft-shy friend companies not feel "trapped" by the share-alike feeling of copyleft licenses such as the (L)GPL. Attitudes in various companies are gradually changing, and Google does work on a number of (A|L)GPL projects, but for now you're going to see most of the work coming out of Google be available under permissive licenses.
There is a certain logic to putting the reference implementation of any standard under a permissive license. If one does so, any company or individual can take the code and incorporate it into any project, with little thought paid to licensing back the changes or releasing code or schematics. This allows a standard to quickly gain acceptance and get a bit of a "head start" in use in the wild.
However there is a bit of a problem with getting everyone to use the same reference standard. If you look at something like WebM, you'll see that the reference is...the standard which is... the reference. Did I confuse you yet? What I mean to say is that if there is only one implementation of a given technology, then it is likely that the implementation is inextricably bound together with the documentation for the standard, and it is highly likely (as was the case with WebM) that a compatible implementation cannot be constructed merely from the documentation, but must be partially guessed at or inferred from the reference.
So while I am supportive of the desire to have reference implementations of a standard available under a permissive license, I am also quite in favor of a requirement of several standards bodies which is that they will not ratify or recommend a standard until there are at least two independent, inter-operable implementations of the proposed standard.
Which citizen's group do I send money to for the purpose of pushing legislation that requires the government is honest to the people. Lies like this should be actionable.
Find Dick Cheyney and tell him that there are some quail loose in the state government building...:-)
But you do have a good point -- who's the right person to call this office out and get them to fix the problem? I mean if I lived in Alaska near the state's offices, I'd be tempted to grab a handful of usb thumbdrives, cables, hard drive enclosure, and my laptop, and go down there and offer my technical help in transferring the digital documents off of whatever babbage machine of a computer they have there and onto the Internets.
"Oracle is swinging around their Java assets like a machete" WTF are you talking about? The only issue with Java was so far with Google's Android,
Did you miss the whole about-face from Oracle? Before they owned Sun they were big champions of spinning-of Java oversight to a foundation, but lo and behold the minute they snapped up Sun, they clammed up and didn't respond to requests like Apache's request for a FOSS license to the java conformance tests.
I'm not Gosling or anything, but from my limited understanding of the situation, Oracle has burnt more bridges during its brief ownership of the Java environment than Sun ever did.
Java is only used in OOorg for the database access. That's it, nothing more. It would be trivial to remove all Java from OOorg.
As you point out, there is a bit more -- some "special features," apparently. But my big concern isn't that there's a lot of Java in there, it's that there's Java code in there at all. Apache is a Java house. Aside from their web server, I can't think of another ASF project that isn't written in Java.
My concern is that if the project goes to the ASF, they'll integrate more Java code into it. It just seems plausible to me. And that seems very dangerous, considering who is holding control on all of Sun's Java stuff. Maybe I'm just worried over nothing here, but I'd at least like to voice my concerns so that if, in 5 years time, OOo is in Apache's quiver and has larger dependencies on Java, I can say "I told you so!":-)
In any case, I'm going to push for LO under the stewardship of TDF. Given the bad blood from Oracle on their initial handling of the situation, I believe that most distros will stick with LO for the near future, and will wait to see if OOo under ASF actually builds any significant community.
...an advertisement for GitHub alongside this article.
("How to make a bomb" [fork me on GitHub!])
Yes, cyberwarfare is an important part of tackling problems with terrorism, however I'm not really sure if replacing content wholesale like this is actually that useful of an idea.
Wouldn't it be more effective to just tweak the bomb recipe so that it would subtly fail? If you replace a bomb recipe with one for cupcakes, no committed suicide bomber is going to stay and whip up some buttercream frosting instead of an IED. It's a dick move, but one might even be tempted to tweak a bomb recipe so that people trying to follow the steps would cause themselves harm, instead of making a working device.
I see the turn more like a political one. The Apache Foundation criticized Oracle for Java and left the JCP EC, now Oracle is giving them something to come back maybe? And at the same time punish the TDO for forking OpenOffice by giving OO to Apache and as such not recognize TDF as a legit successor.
Yes, I, too, am confused as to why Oracle would give the project to Apache.
One possible reason to give it to Apache is that they seem to be hooked on Java like nobody else. Don't get me wrong here, I love a lot of the projects that Apache works on, I use the Apache webserver on most of my machines, and I even try to give them some money each year, however their reliance on Java always seemed an odd fit, and now that Oracle is swinging around their Java assets like a machete, I don't want any more of my software relying on Java.
AFAIK, TDF has been working to de-couple Java from the OOo code, something that I believe was never a priority for Sun (in fact I believe that they might have been inclined to do the opposite, given that Java was their baby). If the Apache Foundation assumes oversight over one copy of the OOo codebase, I am concerned that they might (unintentionally) make the project more open to attack from Oracle in the future.
I'm sure we'll all be closely following what the Apache Foundation and TDF do in the next couple of weeks...
Tell the USA that they can stick their patents in their software and keep them... and that they can use our nice, un-encumbered software if they can bear the humiliation of using something not invented here.:)
You mean like Linux, which was started by Torvalds in a foreign country (Finland), or do you mean like StarOffice, written by StarDivision in another foreign country (Germany)?
Sure, software patents suck, but given the insane amount of software development going on in the US I think that it's of global concern to the FOSS community that software patents still exist here...
If PageRank was a trade secret, they would need to patent it and therefore it wouldn't be published.
WTF?
"Trade Secret" and "Patent" are two entirely separate mechanisms one can use to protect a competitive advantage under US law.
If your mechanism for making awesome metal swords is a Trade Secret, then you don't patent it. The whole point is that you don't give your competitors any information about the process, other than that which they can get from analysis and reverse engineering. Your security comes from the difficulty of reverse-engineering the given process. It also doesn't reveal how one gets from the input ingredients to the final output (or perhaps even what the inputs are), so if you figure out a better method, you can protect that as a Trade Secret.
Patents, on the other hand, are a organized monopoly. The supposed benefit to society and industry is that one person who figures out a new process can ask for a limited monopoly for a brief period of time, with the tradeoff being that the industry (theoretically) gets all the detailed information it needs to reproduce this process.
As far as I can tell, patents nowadays don't necessarily provide all of the necessary information for actual implementation anymore, which means that they aren't that useful to society after the patent expires. But I digress...
Also from TFA, in the same section: "To minimize the impact on others, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license."
I'm pretty sure I read the whole length of the SFLC's paper about how to reuse permissive-licensed code under a copyleft license like the GPL, but I can't remember anything in there that showed how to indicate which parts of a file are under one license versus another.
Maybe they're suggesting that people just do it on a file-by-file basis, but that part seems mostly like a no-brainer (no?).
"Please don't use it for software..., since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL."
A little birdie dumped a codebase on my head recently and one of the many bugfixes I had to do before I could even legally distribute the thing was to rip out some CC-BY-SA code and replace it with something GPL-compatible.
I have no doubt in my mind that whoever chose the CC license for that code wasn't thinking. Or at least not that much. They wanted to open the code? Great. They wanted to copyleft it? Marvelous as well. A copyleft license like the GPL probably would have been fine for them. That's why we need more simplistic documents like the one that the FSF created.
I do have some concerns about the GFDL and the CC licenses for documentation. On the one hand I feel that CC-BY-SA doesn't have some of the legacy non-free baggage mechanisms that you can find in the GFDL. On the other hand I have personally run into problems where documentation for projects includes non-trivial code examples, and the Benton Fraser in me has dutifully tried to get specific permission or dual-licensing on the code examples so that I can use them in a program.
I hope that, just as there has been work to make the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 licenses compatible, we'll see future work to make some of the CC licenses more compatible with permissive and/or copyleft code licenses. Remember that the FSF endorsed that relicensing escape-clause for Wikipedia and some other sites a little while ago, so it seems plausible that there might be some hope for reconciliation and cooperation in the future. At least we can all hope.
if they're going to mention things like the Apache license, they should include the BSD license....Whether you agree with it or not, it's a valid license, and should be included in the decision tree for choosing a license.
I mean look at it this way: This is the FSF's cheat-sheet decision tree for people to choose a Free Software license. You could easily compare this document with that page that Creative Commons has to help people choose a Free Culture license.
Now I don't have (read: I'm too lazy to go look up the url right now) the CC page memorized, but last I remembered they only put a few of their CC licenses on there. There wasn't any CC0 listed, and I don't remember the CC-GPL or the Remix license (not sure if that latter license is even being promoted by them anymore).
If the FSF's target is people who don't geek out on the particular nuances of "distribute" vs "convey" in a FOSS license, then they aren't going to give someone a complete primer on all licenses. Remember that this document is designed as a tool for choosing a license, not working with existing licenses. Sure, if I had to educate a bunch of software developers about FOSS licenses I would probably start with the GPL, then move to BSD (3-clause, natch), MIT, Apache, and maybe sprinkle in some cautionary tales about weak or incompatible licenses. But that ain't the game here.
It's obvious why the FSF chose the Apache 2.0 license as their default permissive license
It's well written by Real Laywers
It offers some patent protection
It's GPLv3-compatible
Sure, the new BSD and MIT licenses are shorter, but they don't offer developers and end-users the same kinds of structured protections that are available in the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0. And that's what the FSF is designed to promote.
They intentionally glossed over the BSD license because it provides more freedom to developers and doesn't require copyright assignment to the FSF, period.
"more freedom" == the same nebulous debate that/. has every fortnight between a permissive license and the GPL.
And none of the licenses that they mentioned "require copyright assignment" to the FSF or any other entity. I can't think of a single FOSS license that specifies that in the license proper.
C'mon, Anonymous Troll, at least pick a fight that requires me to fire up more than a couple of brain cells.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the coral cache link (assuming I can get the page to load...)
Heck with change.org -- why don't we just use that new-fangled petition-the-President site and ask Obama to order the University to release the video?
I mean, it's not like the Whitehouse petition site will foster any *real* change...
This is my server. Running wordpress. I have supercache enabled and all of my media is on a CDN. Still couldn't handle the load. Sorry guys.
If you can get this coral cache link to load somehow (iptable-bounce everyone but their ip addresses?), then we'll be all set.
danke.
http://www.freegeek.org/
This could potentially impact how they recycle and reuse computers, especially the fact that Apple is providing free recycling for monitors, which usually cost $12 to recycle in any recycling place around the country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa_p9Up9DFg#t=2m00
Hail Google! Hail Lord Google!
No, Google should have bid a complex number.
I mean, they kind of did that with their bid of $3.14159 * 10^9 + 0i, right?
Just imagine what the accountants would have done if The Goog had tried to bid a non-trivial complex number.... probably just complained that they didn't have a column for "i" in their spreadsheet... :-)
Airprint, like so many Apple services, is a specific configuration of open-standard protocols, APIs, etc. that they've given a a proprietary name to, while trying to convince customers that they've created something unique and proprietary.
While I agree that there might be many Apple services that fit that bill, there are also other ones that have only basic support on things like Ubuntu because the protocols are (AFAIK) truly closed and proprietary, such as AirPlay.
The problem with a lot of these widgety things (whether from Apple or Microsoft or whomever), is that someone buys one of them and then requires all of their underlings (or sidelings, if they're just at the same level in the ladder) to use this item, often by downloading some proprietary programs or drivers. Most Windows and Mac users can't tell a command line from a chorus line, and most of any questions or concerns us geeky types have about this just goes *whoosh* right over their heads.
If AirPrint really is an open spec built on top of other open protocols, and if Apple is committed to putting at least a token bit of effort into interoperability with other deices, then that's really good. I'm always hesitant to use any "iProtocol" or "AirThisAndThat," based on my past experiences.
From lurking on the Meego lists it sounds like a number of the Nokians hacking on MeeGo and Qt shifted from working on Nokia's payroll to working on Intel's payroll. I believe that some of the teams even stayed in the same cities.
Intel isn't traditionally a mobile device developer, at least not memorably, so it will be interesting to see what Intel does with their new employees. Remember that MeeGo is intended for a number of different form factors (tablet, handheld, notebook, in-vehicle, etc...), so Intel might focus more on other devices and put less emphasis on creating MeeGo smartphones.
The 'BSD-like' license [google.com] Google chose is not right in my opinion. Companies like Microsoft could easily do an 'Embrace-->Extend-->Extinguish' game on the technology.
True, they *could*, although for the moment Microsoft is really jumping on the HTML5/standards wagon like crazy. Note:
- The IE team is cranking through support for various HTML5 features, CSS, etc...
- Windows 8 is apparently going to strongly support HTML5-based apps
- Microsoft seemed okay with supporting WebM in IE as long as it was installed as a separate codec on the system (no promise yet of baking it in)
Also note that according to Wikipedia, marketshare for browsers in May 2011 is something like this:
Internet Explorer (43.5%)
Firefox (27.9%)
Google Chrome (16.8%)
Safari (7.3%)
Opera (2.2%)
Mobile browsers (5.8%)
At this point, if Chrome and Firefox team up on any web technology, they'll have equal marketshare with IE. If Opera and Safari join in, then they have a more than 10% advantage over IE.
This means that if IE tries to embrace/extend here, they'll have not only an uphill battle, but they might find themselves in a fight they can't win. End users will just download Firefox or Chrome and install that if YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever Hot and New website they're using stops working for them.
What is wrong with LGPL ver. 3?
Google likes permissive licenses. Such licenses allow Google and their Copyleft-shy friend companies not feel "trapped" by the share-alike feeling of copyleft licenses such as the (L)GPL. Attitudes in various companies are gradually changing, and Google does work on a number of (A|L)GPL projects, but for now you're going to see most of the work coming out of Google be available under permissive licenses.
There is a certain logic to putting the reference implementation of any standard under a permissive license. If one does so, any company or individual can take the code and incorporate it into any project, with little thought paid to licensing back the changes or releasing code or schematics. This allows a standard to quickly gain acceptance and get a bit of a "head start" in use in the wild.
However there is a bit of a problem with getting everyone to use the same reference standard. If you look at something like WebM, you'll see that the reference is ...the standard which is... the reference. Did I confuse you yet? What I mean to say is that if there is only one implementation of a given technology, then it is likely that the implementation is inextricably bound together with the documentation for the standard, and it is highly likely (as was the case with WebM) that a compatible implementation cannot be constructed merely from the documentation, but must be partially guessed at or inferred from the reference.
So while I am supportive of the desire to have reference implementations of a standard available under a permissive license, I am also quite in favor of a requirement of several standards bodies which is that they will not ratify or recommend a standard until there are at least two independent, inter-operable implementations of the proposed standard.
Re-merge the projects (a la gcc/egcs)
I'd wish you luck, but... you and what army of reuniters?
name it OpenOffice (without the ".org")
Riiiight. Ready to buy out everyone with a stake to the OpenOffice name?
and call it a day.
sure, it would be easy as pie...
Which citizen's group do I send money to for the purpose of pushing legislation that requires the government is honest to the people. Lies like this should be actionable.
Find Dick Cheyney and tell him that there are some quail loose in the state government building... :-)
But you do have a good point -- who's the right person to call this office out and get them to fix the problem? I mean if I lived in Alaska near the state's offices, I'd be tempted to grab a handful of usb thumbdrives, cables, hard drive enclosure, and my laptop, and go down there and offer my technical help in transferring the digital documents off of whatever babbage machine of a computer they have there and onto the Internets.
...but I'll bet you $100 that I could get archive.org or one of the dozens of other repositories of information to host these files within the week.
Someone is just trying to make things difficult for the press.
"Oracle is swinging around their Java assets like a machete" WTF are you talking about? The only issue with Java was so far with Google's Android,
Did you miss the whole about-face from Oracle? Before they owned Sun they were big champions of spinning-of Java oversight to a foundation, but lo and behold the minute they snapped up Sun, they clammed up and didn't respond to requests like Apache's request for a FOSS license to the java conformance tests.
I'm not Gosling or anything, but from my limited understanding of the situation, Oracle has burnt more bridges during its brief ownership of the Java environment than Sun ever did.
Java is only used in OOorg for the database access. That's it, nothing more. It would be trivial to remove all Java from OOorg.
As you point out, there is a bit more -- some "special features," apparently. But my big concern isn't that there's a lot of Java in there, it's that there's Java code in there at all. Apache is a Java house. Aside from their web server, I can't think of another ASF project that isn't written in Java.
My concern is that if the project goes to the ASF, they'll integrate more Java code into it. It just seems plausible to me. And that seems very dangerous, considering who is holding control on all of Sun's Java stuff. Maybe I'm just worried over nothing here, but I'd at least like to voice my concerns so that if, in 5 years time, OOo is in Apache's quiver and has larger dependencies on Java, I can say "I told you so!" :-)
In any case, I'm going to push for LO under the stewardship of TDF. Given the bad blood from Oracle on their initial handling of the situation, I believe that most distros will stick with LO for the near future, and will wait to see if OOo under ASF actually builds any significant community.
...an advertisement for GitHub alongside this article.
("How to make a bomb" [fork me on GitHub!])
Yes, cyberwarfare is an important part of tackling problems with terrorism, however I'm not really sure if replacing content wholesale like this is actually that useful of an idea.
Wouldn't it be more effective to just tweak the bomb recipe so that it would subtly fail? If you replace a bomb recipe with one for cupcakes, no committed suicide bomber is going to stay and whip up some buttercream frosting instead of an IED. It's a dick move, but one might even be tempted to tweak a bomb recipe so that people trying to follow the steps would cause themselves harm, instead of making a working device.
I see the turn more like a political one. The Apache Foundation criticized Oracle for Java and left the JCP EC, now Oracle is giving them something to come back maybe? And at the same time punish the TDO for forking OpenOffice by giving OO to Apache and as such not recognize TDF as a legit successor.
Yes, I, too, am confused as to why Oracle would give the project to Apache.
One possible reason to give it to Apache is that they seem to be hooked on Java like nobody else. Don't get me wrong here, I love a lot of the projects that Apache works on, I use the Apache webserver on most of my machines, and I even try to give them some money each year, however their reliance on Java always seemed an odd fit, and now that Oracle is swinging around their Java assets like a machete, I don't want any more of my software relying on Java.
AFAIK, TDF has been working to de-couple Java from the OOo code, something that I believe was never a priority for Sun (in fact I believe that they might have been inclined to do the opposite, given that Java was their baby). If the Apache Foundation assumes oversight over one copy of the OOo codebase, I am concerned that they might (unintentionally) make the project more open to attack from Oracle in the future.
I'm sure we'll all be closely following what the Apache Foundation and TDF do in the next couple of weeks...
Tell the USA that they can stick their patents in their software and keep them... and that they can use our nice, un-encumbered software if they can bear the humiliation of using something not invented here. :)
You mean like Linux, which was started by Torvalds in a foreign country (Finland), or do you mean like StarOffice, written by StarDivision in another foreign country (Germany)?
Sure, software patents suck, but given the insane amount of software development going on in the US I think that it's of global concern to the FOSS community that software patents still exist here...
(I got here by using longer urls into my profile)
Where is the backup meeting place/blog for slashdot if and when the site has problems?
(e.g. Google has this status page for their apps: http://www.google.com/appsstatus )
If PageRank was a trade secret, they would need to patent it and therefore it wouldn't be published.
WTF?
"Trade Secret" and "Patent" are two entirely separate mechanisms one can use to protect a competitive advantage under US law.
If your mechanism for making awesome metal swords is a Trade Secret, then you don't patent it. The whole point is that you don't give your competitors any information about the process, other than that which they can get from analysis and reverse engineering. Your security comes from the difficulty of reverse-engineering the given process. It also doesn't reveal how one gets from the input ingredients to the final output (or perhaps even what the inputs are), so if you figure out a better method, you can protect that as a Trade Secret.
Patents, on the other hand, are a organized monopoly. The supposed benefit to society and industry is that one person who figures out a new process can ask for a limited monopoly for a brief period of time, with the tradeoff being that the industry (theoretically) gets all the detailed information it needs to reproduce this process.
As far as I can tell, patents nowadays don't necessarily provide all of the necessary information for actual implementation anymore, which means that they aren't that useful to society after the patent expires. But I digress...
Also from TFA, in the same section: "To minimize the impact on others, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license."
I'm pretty sure I read the whole length of the SFLC's paper about how to reuse permissive-licensed code under a copyleft license like the GPL, but I can't remember anything in there that showed how to indicate which parts of a file are under one license versus another.
Maybe they're suggesting that people just do it on a file-by-file basis, but that part seems mostly like a no-brainer (no?).
"Please don't use it for software ..., since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL."
A little birdie dumped a codebase on my head recently and one of the many bugfixes I had to do before I could even legally distribute the thing was to rip out some CC-BY-SA code and replace it with something GPL-compatible.
I have no doubt in my mind that whoever chose the CC license for that code wasn't thinking. Or at least not that much. They wanted to open the code? Great. They wanted to copyleft it? Marvelous as well. A copyleft license like the GPL probably would have been fine for them. That's why we need more simplistic documents like the one that the FSF created.
I do have some concerns about the GFDL and the CC licenses for documentation. On the one hand I feel that CC-BY-SA doesn't have some of the legacy non-free baggage mechanisms that you can find in the GFDL. On the other hand I have personally run into problems where documentation for projects includes non-trivial code examples, and the Benton Fraser in me has dutifully tried to get specific permission or dual-licensing on the code examples so that I can use them in a program.
I hope that, just as there has been work to make the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 licenses compatible, we'll see future work to make some of the CC licenses more compatible with permissive and/or copyleft code licenses. Remember that the FSF endorsed that relicensing escape-clause for Wikipedia and some other sites a little while ago, so it seems plausible that there might be some hope for reconciliation and cooperation in the future. At least we can all hope.
if they're going to mention things like the Apache license, they should include the BSD license....Whether you agree with it or not, it's a valid license, and should be included in the decision tree for choosing a license.
I mean look at it this way: This is the FSF's cheat-sheet decision tree for people to choose a Free Software license. You could easily compare this document with that page that Creative Commons has to help people choose a Free Culture license.
Now I don't have (read: I'm too lazy to go look up the url right now) the CC page memorized, but last I remembered they only put a few of their CC licenses on there. There wasn't any CC0 listed, and I don't remember the CC-GPL or the Remix license (not sure if that latter license is even being promoted by them anymore).
If the FSF's target is people who don't geek out on the particular nuances of "distribute" vs "convey" in a FOSS license, then they aren't going to give someone a complete primer on all licenses. Remember that this document is designed as a tool for choosing a license, not working with existing licenses. Sure, if I had to educate a bunch of software developers about FOSS licenses I would probably start with the GPL, then move to BSD (3-clause, natch), MIT, Apache, and maybe sprinkle in some cautionary tales about weak or incompatible licenses. But that ain't the game here.
It's obvious why the FSF chose the Apache 2.0 license as their default permissive license
Sure, the new BSD and MIT licenses are shorter, but they don't offer developers and end-users the same kinds of structured protections that are available in the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0. And that's what the FSF is designed to promote.
They intentionally glossed over the BSD license because it provides more freedom to developers and doesn't require copyright assignment to the FSF, period.
"more freedom" == the same nebulous debate that /. has every fortnight between a permissive license and the GPL.
And none of the licenses that they mentioned "require copyright assignment" to the FSF or any other entity. I can't think of a single FOSS license that specifies that in the license proper.
C'mon, Anonymous Troll, at least pick a fight that requires me to fire up more than a couple of brain cells.
MOD PARENT UP
You've paid $60 for a game where the only winning move is not to play?
There are some games where you don't want anyone to "win," at least not in a winner/loser sense. You just want the game to keep on going and going. :-)
Oh, Ally Sheedy...
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
Has there ever really been such a thing?
Global Thermonuclear War. Best $60 I ever spent.
Well, except for that one time in Vegas...