Q. How do I get a license?
A.
The license is available when you download the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas from the Microsoft Download Center.
Tried to download this thing to see if it had acceptable (re)distribution terms for inclusion in GPL-compatible programs like AbiWord, KOffice or OpenOffice.org. But all I could find was some xsdref.msi file.
How does one open/extract such a thing? Does anybody has the distribution terms as clean/clear text file?
May I simply point out the artciles More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size and Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More! by David A. Wheeler. That last one shows, that just the Linux kernel alone matches this gift easily. Just add up the rest of the GNU system and no individual (or single company) can match this kind of generosity.
Although specific to GNU projects they still contain very valuable advice for any free software project (especially when the project wants to work nicely together with the rest of the GNU system).
I have it figured out, I think. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is jealous of Darl McBride. *He* yearns to be the most hated man in tech. But no matter how many awful things he says, he's still just the runner up. Actually, no one bothers to hate either of them, but it'd be easy, if we weren't so nice here on the good guy side.
If you haven't looked at it then I would recommend GNU Vmgen, a virtual machine interpreter generator. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/vmgen/
It comes with a nice manual that is an interesting read even if you are writing your interpreter by hand: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/vmgen/html- docs/
This is indeed interesting. The CPL seems to be a copyleft (!) license but subtly different from the GPL to make it incompatible so you cannot combine code from any of the GPLed projects with this to improve and share with your friends. Hmmmm...
It seems that the Apache hackers and FSF hackers are finally talking. See the request for more info from Eben Moglen plus is explanation why he thinks there is an issue with the patent retaliation clause: Email message from Eben Moglen on license-discuss
But why do they do this through public statements on their webpages and/or public mailinglists. Can't these people lookup each other phone number? Really, if I honestly needed an opinion on something which seems so important as this from either the FSF or the Apache Foundation I would call them up (or send a private email) asking to discuss this in person to clear up any confusion that might result from random statements on some website and/or mailinglist. Neither the FSF or Apache did the community as a whole a service by not trying to talk this out first before publishing all these statements about each other.
Wait till you see what happens if you are truely Free to mix and match all that goodness! Sun and Microsoft would never allow something like combining Java and C#. But that is precisely what thos GNU-heads have been doing!
IBM has been much nicer with Eclipse. And You can now combine that, with GNU Classpath and IKVM.NET to bring you Java Eclipse on Mono.NET!. Be free to mix and match the best of two languages. With Free Software you are free to do what some coorporations would never want to happen. Even if it is the best for developers and users!
Amazing! And of course you can just use java as a as a normal language with GCC (gcj).
We even have native eclipse! Super fast, no slow bytecode interpreter needed.
Go away Sun with you proprietary closed non-free java! We don't need you anymore.
The FSF appears (to me) to be completely unbending in its interpretation of the spirit of the GPL, and what is and isn't compatible with it. They'll help you to change your licence to make it compatible, but they won't shift a millimetre on their own position.
Okay, so their philosphical and moral stance more or less requires that behaviour, but it does seem a little unfair to criticise other groups for not cooperating.
Agreed. my point was that it would have been nice of the Apache hackers to send a little note to important groups like the OSI, Debian and the FSF to announce their intend to use this license. They worked on it for three years. How hard was it to send a little note to licensing@fsf.org, debian-legal@debian.org and osi@opensource.org saying
hey guys/girls, we are going to use the following license for our projects. Could you tell us whether or not it would qualify as "Open Source"/"Free Software"/"DFSG Free" and/or whether you see any problems or incompatibilities with other licenses/projects wishing to use it?
Then they could have corrected any little mistakes in it and made it really clear that it was OSI-certified and/or GPL-compatible. That would have been nice to the community as a whole. It is a bit silly that they created confusion about these points when it was so easy to make it all cristal clear by contacting the right people in the first place. It is not that bad if this new Apache license isn't OSI-certified or GPL-incompatible. But it is damn nice to know in advance.
It would be really great if this license was GPL compatible since that would allow much more cooperation and use of Apache licensed works in other free software projects. But is it actually GPL-compatible?
I couldn't find the Apache 2.0 license on the FSF license list. The only "official" remark seems to be the following email thread which says:
Whether or not they are considered compatible
by the FSF is an opinion only they can make, but given that a
derivative work consisting of both Apache Licensed code and GPL
code can be distributed under the GPL (according to *our* opinion),
there really isn't anything to be discussed.
Maybe it was a bit premature to announce this license without waiting for OSI approval and requesting feedback from the FSF. Of course the Apache group can do whatever they want without asking for approval and blessing from other Open Source and Free Software groups. But it would have been nice to try to cooperate a bit more.
May 12, 2003, SCO: We own UNIX. Those Linux thieves stole it. Now we are going to make them pay!
May 28, 2003, Novell: Your letter annoyed us. You don't own UNIX, we do.
June 6, 2003, Novell: Stick to the facts and stop threathening us.
June 6, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX, stop telling everybody you own it. You did that on purpose on the same day as our earning annoucement. We also want to know what IBM told you and what you told IBM.
June 9, 2003, Novell: You can't just terminate IBM's license, so stop claiming you will. We do have the right to tell you what to do, you know.
June 11, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX and we can do what we want. Stop telling everybody we can't, or else...
June 12, 2003, Novell: Come on, you can't be serious. When we signed the contracts we promised IBM you could not terminate the license. We at Novell keep our promises.
June 12, 2003, SCO: Okay, now you've done it. You didn't listen, so now we are giving IBM permission to keep using AIX. You may not like it, but it the way it is. The license will not be terminated!
June 18, 2003, Novell: Our press release about the copyrights coinciding with your earnings annouchment was purely coincidental. We do not want to hurt you, we are just protecting our interests.
June 24, 2003, Novell : You signed contracts with Microsoft and somebody else. You can't just do that without telling us first. What's up with that? So, we demand to get copies and demand that you do not do this again. Once we have the copies we will determine if you have to give their money to us instead.
June 26, 2003, Novell: You keep telling you own the patents and copyrights of UNIX. We do acknowledge you had the right to acquire 'some' of the copyrights and we are still looking into it how much exactly you are entitled to. In any case, you do NOT own the patents.
July 8, 2003, Novell: Please stop bothering our former executives.
July 11, 2003, Novell: You haven't paid us in 6 months, cough up the money! Also, we are definitely going to audit your ass.
July 17, 2003, Novell: We don't like you. You tell people lies. You thought you couldn't do that, so we didn't pay. Luckily for you we determined you could do that, so we will pay. Also, regarding the audit; we're busy, please come back later.
August 4, 2003, Novell: We noticed you registered the UNIX copyrights. We do not agree with that. You had to demonstrate you needed the copyrights and you didn't do that. Tough luck, the copyrights are still ours!
August 7, 2003, Novell: You withheld our money! No mather what your reasons are, you can't do that. We want assurances that this will never happen again. Compy!
August 20, 2003, Novell: You know what, we have a technology license agreement. We want copies of the source and binary code for all versions of UNIX and UnixWare. We tried to call, but you never called back. We want the code and we want to know when we can have it.
September 10, 2003, SCO: We don't agree with your interpretation of our contracts. You are conspiring with IBM to destroy us. SCO is not going to let this happen.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that AIX modifications made by IBM are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. IBM owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Stop bothering IBM.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that IRIX modifications made by SGI are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. SGI owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Even if SGI did contribute UNIX code to Linux, it was very small amount of code and it was removed very quickly. This simply does not warrant terminating SGI's license, so stop threathening that you will.
October 7, 2003, Novell: We heard you are going to send invoices to Linux u
Wish they were so quick with pointing out what contract/copyright/trade secrets, if any, are actually violated by anybody they accuse of doing so... When are the Red Hat and IBM cases scheduled for resolution anyway? This whole thing is going on for far to long. Why does it take so long to resolve these issues through the courts...
QT is distributed under the GPL and SWT under the CPL. Both GPL and CPL are copyleft licenses so a combination of SWT and SWT (being a derived work of both) has to be distributed under terms compatible with both the CPL and GPL. Unfortunately there are some conflicting terms (in particular the patent litigation termination clause) so such a work cannot be distributed:{
There has been talk to get the CPL GPL compatible. Hopefully IBM/Eclipse listens since lots of people would love to combine Eclipse technology with existing GPL code.
Patenting business mathods is legal in the USA, but not Europe, thank goodness!
Although that statement is true, that does not mean that the European Patent Office hasn't granted patents on business methods!
See for example the following Amazon patent on Gift Ordering.
This is the reason big (American) companies, Bolkenstein and the JURI committee are so actively lobbying to get patent law "harmonized" in all of Europe. At the moment some national judges correctly throw out any patent claims based on these illegally granted patents against smaller businesses, but not all European national judges know that the current European Patent Act disallows the European Patent Office from granting these papers. Some fall for official looking patent papers with a nice EU Patent Office stamp on them! Which way do you think the big companies, who hold almost these illegally granted patents, want the law to be harmonized...
Please follow the European patent discussion through http://swpat.ffii.org/. We might have "won the last battle", "the war" is still ongoing!
Check it out:
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarch ives.asp?ArticleID=43982
(Soon there will not be any original code left!)
While it was difficult to ascertain the exact code being shown on screen, attorneys pointed to exact copying of some code from Unix to Linux and claimed that IBM improperly donated almost a million lines of Unix System V code to the Linux 2.4x and Linux 2.5x kernel that infringe on its Unix System V contract with SCO -- and SCO's intellectual property.
SCO claimed that much of the core code of Linux including Non-Uniform Memory Access, the Read Copy Update for high-end database scalability, Journaling File System, XFS, Schedulers, Linux PPC 32 and 64-bit support and enterprise volume management is covered by SCO's Unix System V contracts and copyrights.
For example, 110,000 lines of Unix System V code for read copy update, 55,000 lines of NUMA code and more than 750,000 lines of symmetric multi-processing code from Unix System V has made its way into Linux, attorneys and SCO executives claimed.
Seriously. It is a bit ironic that the Freenet project doesn't run on a free system like Debian GNU/Linux. So there is an effort underway to Free Freenet! See the developer mailinglist archive. Please donate (Matthew Toseland - Toad - is the "Official Codemonkey" of the Freenet Project).
The following (not python but java/gcj based) project is nice The Hunting of the Snark Project.
Although maybe not yet perfect it includes a BitTorrent client and tracker implementation which seems to do very nicely for smaller downloads. It includes a build in webserver and tracker which makes sharing files really easy.
Especially the Richard Stallman quote. The sentence "Linux is a copy of Unix. There is very little new stuff in Linux." Was not from RMS at all.
According to the mailinglist archives it was Larry McVoy who made that statement. Richard just replied to that message. And fixed the statement to read GNU/Linux:)
Don't worry. Remember that we already have some decent free java environments. Since we are talking about Free Software here we are able to marry the best parts of both worlds!
Just read the opinion of the dissenting judges. It is really sad that the other judges could not see this the same way.
Bryer:
This statute will cause serious expression-related harm.
It will likely restrict traditional dissemination of copy-righted works.
It will likely inhibit new forms of dissemination through the use
of new technology.
It threatens to interfere with efforts to preserve our Nation's
historical and cultural heritage and efforts to use that heritage,
say, to educate our Nation's children.
It is easy to understand how the statute might benefit the private
financial interests of corporations or heirs who own existing
copyrights. But I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate,
copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public.
Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and
the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear.
I have set forth the analysis upon which I rest these judgments.
This analysis leads inexorably to the conclusion that the statute
cannot be understood rationally to advance a constitutionally
legitimate interest. The statute falls outside the scope of legislative
power that the Copyright Clause, read in light of the First Amendment,
grants to Congress. I would hold the statute unconstitutional.
I respectfully dissent.
Stevens:
By failing to protect the public interest in free access to
the products of inventive and artistic genius indeed, by
virtually ignoring the central purpose of the Copyright/Patent
Clause the Court has quitclaimed to Con gress its principal
responsibility in this area of the law.
Fairly read, the Court has stated that Congress actions
under the Copyright/Patent Clause are, for all intents and
purposes, judicially unreviewable. That result cannot be
squared with the basic tenets of our constitutional structure.
It is not hyperbole to recall the trenchant words of
Chief Justice John Marshall: It is emphatically the province
and duty of the judicial department to say what the
law is. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). We
should discharge that responsibility as we did in Chadha.
It has nothing to do with the GPL. According to the current W3C proposal a RF patent license may restrict the field of use. So it could say that no royalty fee is needed if the standard is used in one specific way, but as soon as you do anything different you need to pay royalties anyway (the example given is implementing such a standard for the Konqueror browser for use on the Web and then someone changes konqueror so that it also works on the normal file system (or anything you can make a IOSlave for, something konqueror is really good at btw). But if you are not free to use the software for any use it isn't free (or open) at all!
For example the Open Source Definiton says:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.
> I'm sorry you don't yet believe that we are striving to be a traditional > company that works well with the Open Source community. Most of our > efforts to date have been in the software arena, and I think some of > what you ran into was the trailing edge of Open Source awareness (in the > hardware business).
The other contributions from Sun are entirely irrelevant.
I don't care about Jinu, Jxta, Jboring, Jawn, or any of that stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The monotone hackers have the same design as this new git tool. They already adapted their visualisation tools to make pretty screenshots of the kernel patches development history: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/monotone-devel/2 005-04/msg00183.html
Tried to download this thing to see if it had acceptable (re)distribution terms for inclusion in GPL-compatible programs like AbiWord, KOffice or OpenOffice.org. But all I could find was some xsdref.msi file.
How does one open/extract such a thing? Does anybody has the distribution terms as clean/clear text file?
May I simply point out the artciles More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size and Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More! by David A. Wheeler. That last one shows, that just the Linux kernel alone matches this gift easily. Just add up the rest of the GNU system and no individual (or single company) can match this kind of generosity.
If you haven't looked at it then I would recommend GNU Vmgen, a virtual machine interpreter generator. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/vmgen/
- docs/
It comes with a nice manual that is an interesting read even if you are writing your interpreter by hand: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/vmgen/html
This is indeed interesting. The CPL seems to be a copyleft (!) license but subtly different from the GPL to make it incompatible so you cannot combine code from any of the GPLed projects with this to improve and share with your friends. Hmmmm...
Email message from Eben Moglen on license-discuss
But why do they do this through public statements on their webpages and/or public mailinglists. Can't these people lookup each other phone number? Really, if I honestly needed an opinion on something which seems so important as this from either the FSF or the Apache Foundation I would call them up (or send a private email) asking to discuss this in person to clear up any confusion that might result from random statements on some website and/or mailinglist. Neither the FSF or Apache did the community as a whole a service by not trying to talk this out first before publishing all these statements about each other.
And some screenshots of Free Swing and Free AWT/2D!
IBM has been much nicer with Eclipse. And You can now combine that, with GNU Classpath and IKVM.NET to bring you Java Eclipse on Mono .NET!. Be free to mix and match the best of two languages. With Free Software you are free to do what some coorporations would never want to happen. Even if it is the best for developers and users!
Amazing! And of course you can just use java as a as a normal language with GCC (gcj). We even have native eclipse! Super fast, no slow bytecode interpreter needed.
Go away Sun with you proprietary closed non-free java! We don't need you anymore.
Agreed. my point was that it would have been nice of the Apache hackers to send a little note to important groups like the OSI, Debian and the FSF to announce their intend to use this license. They worked on it for three years. How hard was it to send a little note to licensing@fsf.org, debian-legal@debian.org and osi@opensource.org saying
Then they could have corrected any little mistakes in it and made it really clear that it was OSI-certified and/or GPL-compatible. That would have been nice to the community as a whole. It is a bit silly that they created confusion about these points when it was so easy to make it all cristal clear by contacting the right people in the first place. It is not that bad if this new Apache license isn't OSI-certified or GPL-incompatible. But it is damn nice to know in advance.I couldn't find the Apache 2.0 license on the FSF license list. The only "official" remark seems to be the following email thread which says:
Maybe it was a bit premature to announce this license without waiting for OSI approval and requesting feedback from the FSF. Of course the Apache group can do whatever they want without asking for approval and blessing from other Open Source and Free Software groups. But it would have been nice to try to cooperate a bit more.
Grin. The following summary from groklaw seems to sum it up nicely.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2004011 30 20257821
May 12, 2003, SCO: We own UNIX. Those Linux thieves stole it. Now we are going to make them pay!
May 28, 2003, Novell: Your letter annoyed us. You don't own UNIX, we do.
June 6, 2003, Novell: Stick to the facts and stop threathening us.
June 6, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX, stop telling everybody you own it. You did that on purpose on the same day as our earning annoucement. We also want to know what IBM told you and what you told IBM.
June 9, 2003, Novell: You can't just terminate IBM's license, so stop claiming you will. We do have the right to tell you what to do, you know.
June 11, 2003, SCO: We do own UNIX and we can do what we want. Stop telling everybody we can't, or else...
June 12, 2003, Novell: Come on, you can't be serious. When we signed the contracts we promised IBM you could not terminate the license. We at Novell keep our promises.
June 12, 2003, SCO: Okay, now you've done it. You didn't listen, so now we are giving IBM permission to keep using AIX. You may not like it, but it the way it is. The license will not be terminated!
June 18, 2003, Novell: Our press release about the copyrights coinciding with your earnings annouchment was purely coincidental. We do not want to hurt you, we are just protecting our interests.
June 24, 2003, Novell : You signed contracts with Microsoft and somebody else. You can't just do that without telling us first. What's up with that? So, we demand to get copies and demand that you do not do this again. Once we have the copies we will determine if you have to give their money to us instead.
June 26, 2003, Novell: You keep telling you own the patents and copyrights of UNIX. We do acknowledge you had the right to acquire 'some' of the copyrights and we are still looking into it how much exactly you are entitled to. In any case, you do NOT own the patents.
July 8, 2003, Novell: Please stop bothering our former executives.
July 11, 2003, Novell: You haven't paid us in 6 months, cough up the money! Also, we are definitely going to audit your ass.
July 17, 2003, Novell: We don't like you. You tell people lies. You thought you couldn't do that, so we didn't pay. Luckily for you we determined you could do that, so we will pay. Also, regarding the audit; we're busy, please come back later.
August 4, 2003, Novell: We noticed you registered the UNIX copyrights. We do not agree with that. You had to demonstrate you needed the copyrights and you didn't do that. Tough luck, the copyrights are still ours!
August 7, 2003, Novell: You withheld our money! No mather what your reasons are, you can't do that. We want assurances that this will never happen again. Compy!
August 20, 2003, Novell: You know what, we have a technology license agreement. We want copies of the source and binary code for all versions of UNIX and UnixWare. We tried to call, but you never called back. We want the code and we want to know when we can have it.
September 10, 2003, SCO: We don't agree with your interpretation of our contracts. You are conspiring with IBM to destroy us. SCO is not going to let this happen.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that AIX modifications made by IBM are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. IBM owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Stop bothering IBM.
October 7, 2003, Novell: You seem to think that IRIX modifications made by SGI are subject to restrictions. Sorry, but that is simply not true. SGI owns their own code and can do with it what they like. Even if SGI did contribute UNIX code to Linux, it was very small amount of code and it was removed very quickly. This simply does not warrant terminating SGI's license, so stop threathening that you will.
October 7, 2003, Novell: We heard you are going to send invoices to Linux u
SCO Purchases Specific Novell Assets
Wish they were so quick with pointing out what contract/copyright/trade secrets, if any, are actually violated by anybody they accuse of doing so...
When are the Red Hat and IBM cases scheduled for resolution anyway? This whole thing is going on for far to long. Why does it take so long to resolve these issues through the courts...
QT is distributed under the GPL and SWT under the CPL. Both GPL and CPL are copyleft licenses so a combination of SWT and SWT (being a derived work of both) has to be distributed under terms compatible with both the CPL and GPL. Unfortunately there are some conflicting terms (in particular the patent litigation termination clause) so such a work cannot be distributed :{
There has been talk to get the CPL GPL compatible. Hopefully IBM/Eclipse listens since lots of people would love to combine Eclipse technology with existing GPL code.
Although that statement is true, that does not mean that the European Patent Office hasn't granted patents on business methods!
See for example the following Amazon patent on Gift Ordering.
This is the reason big (American) companies, Bolkenstein and the JURI committee are so actively lobbying to get patent law "harmonized" in all of Europe. At the moment some national judges correctly throw out any patent claims based on these illegally granted patents against smaller businesses, but not all European national judges know that the current European Patent Act disallows the European Patent Office from granting these papers. Some fall for official looking patent papers with a nice EU Patent Office stamp on them! Which way do you think the big companies, who hold almost these illegally granted patents, want the law to be harmonized...
Please follow the European patent discussion through http://swpat.ffii.org/. We might have "won the last battle", "the war" is still ongoing!
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarc
(Soon there will not be any original code left!)
While it was difficult to ascertain the exact code being shown on screen, attorneys pointed to exact copying of some code from Unix to Linux and claimed that IBM improperly donated almost a million lines of Unix System V code to the Linux 2.4x and Linux 2.5x kernel that infringe on its Unix System V contract with SCO -- and SCO's intellectual property.
SCO claimed that much of the core code of Linux including Non-Uniform Memory Access, the Read Copy Update for high-end database scalability, Journaling File System, XFS, Schedulers, Linux PPC 32 and 64-bit support and enterprise volume management is covered by SCO's Unix System V contracts and copyrights.
For example, 110,000 lines of Unix System V code for read copy update, 55,000 lines of NUMA code and more than 750,000 lines of symmetric multi-processing code from Unix System V has made its way into Linux, attorneys and SCO executives claimed.
Seriously. It is a bit ironic that the Freenet project doesn't run on a free system like Debian GNU/Linux. So there is an effort underway to Free Freenet! See the developer mailinglist archive. Please donate (Matthew Toseland - Toad - is the "Official Codemonkey" of the Freenet Project).
The following (not python but java/gcj based) project is nice The Hunting of the Snark Project.
Although maybe not yet perfect it includes a BitTorrent client and tracker implementation which seems to do very nicely for smaller downloads. It includes a build in webserver and tracker which makes sharing files really easy.
According to the mailinglist archives it was Larry McVoy who made that statement. Richard just replied to that message. And fixed the statement to read GNU/Linux :)
The mozilla developers will have a get together: http://eu.mozdev.org/Brussels2003/schedule.html
And here is the schedule for the PostgreSQL talks http://candle.pha.pa.us/fosdem/
If you are interested in Embedded devices you might find the following interesting: http://www.fosdem.org/index/dev_room/dev_room_embe dded
Look at IKVM.NET for an example:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0109845/
GNU Classpath meets Mono!
Bryer:
Stevens: Full text can be found on Lawrence Lessig his Blog.For example the Open Source Definiton says:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=103 830199306037&w=2
> I'm sorry you don't yet believe that we are striving to be a traditional
> company that works well with the Open Source community. Most of our
> efforts to date have been in the software arena, and I think some of
> what you ran into was the trailing edge of Open Source awareness (in the
> hardware business).
The other contributions from Sun are entirely irrelevant.
I don't care about Jinu, Jxta, Jboring, Jawn, or any of that
stuff.
I care about running on ultrasparc III.