Sadly, you don't actually know what you are talking about. For actual information on the GPL and it's legal status, I reccommend the articles linked to from this page.
Miguel,
Evan's article was flamebait, and didn't include all the facts available at the time. However, you really aren't the best person to speak about GNOME's relationship to AbiWord, given your statements about Abi in this LinuxPlanet article:
http://www.linuxplanet.c om/ linuxplanet/opinions/2310/1/ where you say
<quote>AbiWord, yeah. It's fairly larval.</quote>
Needless to say, this sort of thing, combined with the statements coming out of Sun at the time, didn't inspire confidence in us AbiWord developers that we were even on your radar screen (despite being on your web page). Sam TH
Well, as an AbiWord developer, I feel it neccessary to clear up some misconceptions here.
(1) The GNOME Foundation is evil.
This is simple untrue. The GNOME Foundation is a good idea, will be democratically run, and is led by some great people.
(2) GNOME has made official decisons
According to Havoc Pennington and others, no specific decisions have been made by GNOME people. I believe them on this.
(3) Sun actually understands this other than as a way to make money.
Anyone who thinks that Sun is after anything but money is deluding themselves. Sadly, it also appears they still haven't got the open standards idea.
For LOTS more on this, see my posting to abiword-dev, among others, her e. Sam TH
The Rainbow Warrior was a fairly large Greenpeace ship, that was protesting French nuclear testing in the south Pacific. Some French commandos blew a large hole in the side, causing it to sink, and killing a photographer. The French have never admitted this or apologized, but they were orderd to pay 1.9 million in damages by an arbitraitor. Sam TH
AbiWord is much better in this regard, but it doesn't understand tables and many other things, like TOCs, etc. - so what you get is mostly text.
This is totally true. In fact, our importer (wv) imports even the features you mentioned, it's just that we can't deal with them. The quality of our importer is due primarily to one person, Caolan McNamara, who wrote wv and deserves mad props for it. Sam TH
It would appear you haven't used Word Perfect for long periods of time. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you had, you could never make such comments about the most crucial word processor feature of all time. It allowed me to fix more problems than you can shake a stick at while I was a word perfect user. When AbiWord gets to that point, we will have Reveal Codes also.
Additonally, Word does use embedded codes, unless you never press control-b or any other such command. If you don't believe me, read the code for wv, which is the word importer we use for AbiWord. Sam TH
AS one of the programmers who helped write the brief, and who has been a part of the OpenLaw effort since it began on Slashdot, it has been an enlightening experience. I know I have learned lots about the law, but also about our ability to make things happen. If it had not been for programmers, the DeCSS controversy would not have happend. If it had not been for people like slashdot readers, the mirror campaign that we filed to support would not have happend. If we work together, we really can "trouble the counsels of the great."
My first real language was Scheme, the summer before high school. (I had written a little in Turbo Pascal previously). Scheme made me a programmer. Despite what some people have commented, the syntax is amazingly easy. You could write the scheme syntax in less than ten rules, and only about 3 are necessary to start programming. And as people have said, it causes you to write good code. But it's not that it forces you. Instead, once you start thinking in scheme, your code just flows properly. If you have the scheme mindset, your code will most likely be good, especially at the beginning stages. I know it made me a better programmer to learn it first.
To learn it, just check out the Schemer's Guide (which is designed for classroom instruction). It's from schemers.org, which is mentioned above.
Actually, the opinons of most of the OpenLaw people is just the opposite. Garbus is clearly very knowledgable, and very capable. Despite his inexperience with the technology, he has learned very quickly. If I were on trial, I would want him as my lawyer.
On the other hand, Kaplan seems to be very heavily biased against the defense. If you read over the transcripts again, he dismisses defense arguments without consideration, and accepts arguments by the plaintiffs with similar cause. He has managed to earn the ire of several people (including John Young, of Cryptome). Sam TH
When Mattel contacted my university, they buckled. So I had to take my mirror of cphack down. So I hosted it at a free website company. First I tried geocities, but they threw me off for 'hacking.' So I went someplace called 50megs.com, where they have yet to give me any trouble.
I find it remarkable that you advocate silencing automatically those people who mention GNOME on a KDE thread, yet your sig refers to a BSS entitles UNCENSORED. Ah, the irony. Sam TH
I'm pretty sure that your birth language is not usually written in Feanorian script (or the Tengwar of Rumil, either). If it is, you had some f**cked up parents. Now, the Cirth, on the other hand . .. Sam TH
I feel compelled to point out that you are entirely mistaken. Tolkein spent his life as a linguist, or more specifically a philologist. He taught at Oxford for most of his career. His major area of research was into Anglo-Saxon languages (he has an important essay on Beowulf.)
He was certainly catholic, and if one wants to, one can see that in the books.
I think you may have been thinking of CS Lewis, one of the most famous Christian apologists of this century. (The Chronicles of Narnia is a Christ allegory).
Well, my father told me that when he lived in England, he met people from Scotland whom he could not understand, despite the fact that they both spoke "english".
German is particularily bad at this. The 'dialect' spoken in the Rhineland is totally unintelligble if you only know high German. As an example, "lass uns gehen" means "let us go." In Platt Deutsch (spoken in Duesseldorf), this would be pronounced "la ma yon." Swiss German is even worse. I can't even tell that swiss people are speaking the same language as me.
Bad analogy, I know, but the only better one I can think of involves Tolkien, and I don't want to go there;-)
Well, go there anyway -
I can think of at least 4 potentail examples
1 - After the capture of Melkor after he overthrew the Lamps, they could have shoved him out into the Void, but didn't. This analogy reveals that your question in some ways boils down to one about the death penalty.
2 - After the War of Wrath, Melkor does get the 'death penalty', but they don't end up killing all the bad guys (hence LotR).
3 - After the victory of the Last Alliance, they could have destroyed Sauron, but did not. They just try to imprison him.
4 - After the War of the Ring, Sauron is finally disposed of, but evil is not entirely wiped out (no scorched earth).
Well, I hope that doesn't reveal me to be too much of a Tolkien geek.
The part that takes effect later this year is the part that says you can't disable access control. The part that prohibits distribution of access control circumvention tools is already in effect, and is the part that 2600.com is being sued under. Sam TH
For the DMCA to cover it, it has to be a "technological measure controlling access to a work protected under this title." That would be Title 17, copyright law. (You know you do this to much when you can cite the DMCA without reference to the text. )
As for your second question, the answer is less clear. It would probably depend if it was several works, one of which was copyrighted, or if it was one work (which would probably be copyrighted.)
Of course, this may be because the finding are not out yet. The other sources may have decided to wait 5-10 minutes, and not have to rely on "sources". When it does come out, the findings will be at usvms.gpo.gov. Sam TH
The real reason (or at least one of the real reasons) that this is Netscape 6 and not 5 is that the beginnings of Netscape 5 actually existed. This is what was origianlly handed over to mozilla.org. Then it was decided (after a lot of work had been done) that it would be better to start from scratch. Therefore, Netscape 5 died before the public at large ever saw it, and the current mozilla product is version 6. Sam TH
For better or worse, Mozilla (at least in all the current builds) includes Mail, News and Composer. I don't really know where they got rid of 10Mb of program, but it wasn't by leaving those out. Sam TH
If you go look at the Bell Labs site you can see that the papers on the subject reference erbium doping for the fibers, which IIRC is fairly common for extremely high speed applications. Sam TH
However, there is an additional reason why this doesn't apply - this was by Ken Thompson, who was considered trustworthy by the people using his cc. If Linus decided to insert a virus into the kernel, or the egcs steering committee into gcc, we would be in trouble. But those people are in their positions for many reasons, one of which is that we trust them NOT to do this. While we don't put as much trust in the maintainers as ordinary consumers put in, say, Microsoft, it is important to be able to trust the makers of your most important software. Sam TH
I understand that Slackware is older than most distributions. However, he could have just tried to make changes to SLS, or creat an addon (eg Mandrake). But he decided to create a new distribution. I just wonder what about SLS he didn't like. Sam TH
Slashdot Mirror
Sam TH
Miguel,
Evan's article was flamebait, and didn't include all the facts available at the time. However, you really aren't the best person to speak about GNOME's relationship to AbiWord, given your statements about Abi in this LinuxPlanet article:
http://www.linuxplanet.c om/ linuxplanet/opinions/2310/1/
where you say
<quote>AbiWord, yeah. It's fairly larval.</quote>
Needless to say, this sort of thing, combined with the statements coming out of Sun at the time, didn't inspire confidence in us AbiWord developers that we were even on your radar screen (despite being on your web page).
Sam TH
Well, as an AbiWord developer, I feel it neccessary to clear up some misconceptions here.
(1) The GNOME Foundation is evil.
This is simple untrue. The GNOME Foundation is a good idea, will be democratically run, and is led by some great people.
(2) GNOME has made official decisons
According to Havoc Pennington and others, no specific decisions have been made by GNOME people. I believe them on this.
(3) Sun actually understands this other than as a way to make money.
Anyone who thinks that Sun is after anything but money is deluding themselves. Sadly, it also appears they still haven't got the open standards idea.
For LOTS more on this, see my posting to abiword-dev, among others, her e.
Sam TH
Other than endoresement of PICS, what recent poor/ani-civil liberties decisons has the EFF made?
Sam TH
The Rainbow Warrior was a fairly large Greenpeace ship, that was protesting French nuclear testing in the south Pacific. Some French commandos blew a large hole in the side, causing it to sink, and killing a photographer. The French have never admitted this or apologized, but they were orderd to pay 1.9 million in damages by an arbitraitor.
Sam TH
This is totally true. In fact, our importer (wv) imports even the features you mentioned, it's just that we can't deal with them. The quality of our importer is due primarily to one person, Caolan McNamara, who wrote wv and deserves mad props for it.
Sam TH
Additonally, Word does use embedded codes, unless you never press control-b or any other such command. If you don't believe me, read the code for wv, which is the word importer we use for AbiWord.
Sam TH
Ding ding ding! ... New Jersey! :-)
You win an all expenses paid vacation to
I'm impressed that you picked it out that easily.
Sam TH
Bonus points for getting the quotation.
Sam TH
My first real language was Scheme, the summer before high school. (I had written a little in Turbo Pascal previously). Scheme made me a programmer. Despite what some people have commented, the syntax is amazingly easy. You could write the scheme syntax in less than ten rules, and only about 3 are necessary to start programming. And as people have said, it causes you to write good code. But it's not that it forces you. Instead, once you start thinking in scheme, your code just flows properly. If you have the scheme mindset, your code will most likely be good, especially at the beginning stages. I know it made me a better programmer to learn it first.
To learn it, just check out the Schemer's Guide (which is designed for classroom instruction). It's from schemers.org, which is mentioned above.
Use Scheme!!!
Sam TH
Actually, the opinons of most of the OpenLaw people is just the opposite. Garbus is clearly very knowledgable, and very capable. Despite his inexperience with the technology, he has learned very quickly. If I were on trial, I would want him as my lawyer.
On the other hand, Kaplan seems to be very heavily biased against the defense. If you read over the transcripts again, he dismisses defense arguments without consideration, and accepts arguments by the plaintiffs with similar cause. He has managed to earn the ire of several people (including John Young, of Cryptome).
Sam TH
When Mattel contacted my university, they buckled. So I had to take my mirror of cphack down. So I hosted it at a free website company. First I tried geocities, but they threw me off for 'hacking.' So I went someplace called 50megs.com, where they have yet to give me any trouble.
Check it out at my home page.
Sam TH
I find it remarkable that you advocate silencing automatically those people who mention GNOME on a KDE thread, yet your sig refers to a BSS entitles UNCENSORED. Ah, the irony.
Sam TH
I'm pretty sure that your birth language is not usually written in Feanorian script (or the Tengwar of Rumil, either). If it is, you had some f**cked up parents. Now, the Cirth, on the other hand . . .
Sam TH
I feel compelled to point out that you are entirely mistaken. Tolkein spent his life as a linguist, or more specifically a philologist. He taught at Oxford for most of his career. His major area of research was into Anglo-Saxon languages (he has an important essay on Beowulf.)
He was certainly catholic, and if one wants to, one can see that in the books.
I think you may have been thinking of CS Lewis, one of the most famous Christian apologists of this century. (The Chronicles of Narnia is a Christ allegory).
Sam TH
Well, my father told me that when he lived in England, he met people from Scotland whom he could not understand, despite the fact that they both spoke "english".
German is particularily bad at this. The 'dialect' spoken in the Rhineland is totally unintelligble if you only know high German. As an example, "lass uns gehen" means "let us go." In Platt Deutsch (spoken in Duesseldorf), this would be pronounced "la ma yon." Swiss German is even worse. I can't even tell that swiss people are speaking the same language as me.
Sam TH
Bad analogy, I know, but the only better one I can think of involves Tolkien, and I don't want to go there ;-)
Well, go there anyway -
I can think of at least 4 potentail examples
1 - After the capture of Melkor after he overthrew the Lamps, they could have shoved him out into the Void, but didn't. This analogy reveals that your question in some ways boils down to one about the death penalty.
2 - After the War of Wrath, Melkor does get the 'death penalty', but they don't end up killing all the bad guys (hence LotR).
3 - After the victory of the Last Alliance, they could have destroyed Sauron, but did not. They just try to imprison him.
4 - After the War of the Ring, Sauron is finally disposed of, but evil is not entirely wiped out (no scorched earth).
Well, I hope that doesn't reveal me to be too much of a Tolkien geek.
Sam TH
The part that takes effect later this year is the part that says you can't disable access control. The part that prohibits distribution of access control circumvention tools is already in effect, and is the part that 2600.com is being sued under.
Sam TH
For the DMCA to cover it, it has to be a "technological measure controlling access to a work protected under this title." That would be Title 17, copyright law. (You know you do this to much when you can cite the DMCA without reference to the text. )
As for your second question, the answer is less clear. It would probably depend if it was several works, one of which was copyrighted, or if it was one work (which would probably be copyrighted.)
Sam TH
Of course, this may be because the finding are not out yet. The other sources may have decided to wait 5-10 minutes, and not have to rely on "sources". When it does come out, the findings will be at usvms.gpo.gov.
Sam TH
The real reason (or at least one of the real reasons) that this is Netscape 6 and not 5 is that the beginnings of Netscape 5 actually existed. This is what was origianlly handed over to mozilla.org. Then it was decided (after a lot of work had been done) that it would be better to start from scratch. Therefore, Netscape 5 died before the public at large ever saw it, and the current mozilla product is version 6.
Sam TH
For better or worse, Mozilla (at least in all the current builds) includes Mail, News and Composer. I don't really know where they got rid of 10Mb of program, but it wasn't by leaving those out.
Sam TH
If you go look at the Bell Labs site you can see that the papers on the subject reference erbium doping for the fibers, which IIRC is fairly common for extremely high speed applications.
Sam TH
However, there is an additional reason why this doesn't apply - this was by Ken Thompson, who was considered trustworthy by the people using his cc. If Linus decided to insert a virus into the kernel, or the egcs steering committee into gcc, we would be in trouble. But those people are in their positions for many reasons, one of which is that we trust them NOT to do this. While we don't put as much trust in the maintainers as ordinary consumers put in, say, Microsoft, it is important to be able to trust the makers of your most important software.
Sam TH
I understand that Slackware is older than most distributions. However, he could have just tried to make changes to SLS, or creat an addon (eg Mandrake). But he decided to create a new distribution. I just wonder what about SLS he didn't like.
Sam TH