Less than 0.5% of traffic involved legal and/or appropriate downloads.
That's fine, as long as you make it clear why you have the policy you do, and don't try to make up silly excuses about how "P2P hasn't been ruled legal". I'd say you guys are doing exactly the right thing, with one minor quibble:
if students have something they wish to download that is only available via torrent, the computing staff will do it for them.
The primary purpose of BT is to save bandwidth for the uploader. Some people may provide alternate access methods, but strongly request that people use BT to keep the bandwidth costs down. I would recommend that you change the "that is only available via torrent" policy to "where preferred access is via torrent". Otherwise, you are punishing third parties for no particular reason.
But as I say, that's a minor quibble. Otherwise, perfect.
You still haven't answered my question: why do you think code is different from CDs/movies/books? So let me ask it one more time. Why do you think code is different from CDs/movies/books? Maybe I'm not making myself clear: what possible reason could you have for thinking that copyright laws don't apply to source code the way that they apply to CDs/books/movies?
While OT, i also do what i please with CDs and movies.
Well, at least you're consistent. You still haven't explained why you think there's a difference between those CDs and movies and code, though. In the eyes of the law, they are all equally copyrighted.
Sorry, but no i wont volunteer to goto court. Its too costly, even when you win.
I will gladly volunteer to pick up all your court costs if you win! I bet dozens of others here would do the same. (It's a pretty safe thing for me to volunteer, since, according to the lawyers I've talked to, your chance of winning is zero.) If you really, truly believe you can win, well, now you have no barriers to trying. So go ahead and volunteer. Put up or shut up.
Cant prove I agreed to any restricting license for code that was RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC.
Most copyrighted materials ARE released to the public. Source code is a rare exception. Book, movies, music - pretty much all of it gets "RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC." No "restricting license" needed, because that material is covered by copyright law. Just as source code is covered by copyright law.
You released it, you don't have any confirmable controlls on it.. It's mine to do as I please.
By that "logic", the latest CDs and movies are all yours to do with as you please as well. Do you really think that logic is going to fly in a court of law? If so, please get in touch with Eben Moglen. He's been looking for someone foolish enough to challenge the GPL for nearly two decades. And you sound like just the kind of fool he had in mind.
Has anyone has to use the courts to enforce the GPL?
No, but if you find someone willing to be the defendant in such a case, please let Eben Moglen know. He's been trying to find someone that foolish for many, many years now. The problem is that when people who have been violating the GPL talk to their lawyers, they quickly settle, rather than taking the case to court. It's almost as if the lawyers for the opposition think the GPL is just too strong to challenge.
The fact that the courts have never had to enforce the GPL should say all that needs to be said. Oh, except in Germany, where the GPL was upheld by the courts recently. Don't try this trick in Germany, no matter how foolish you are.
The SCO/IBM thing has not fizzled out - it's just going through a tedious series of delays. But, at the moment, SCO is now fervently claiming that they have complied with the terms of the GPL, even though they were running around and calling it unconstitutional, unenforcable and void. (Guess their lawyers finally had a look.) Their current position (in court at least) is that, despite all the nonsense they spouted, they are still entitled to use the GPL themselves as a defense against charges of copyright infringement (which is really all the GPL is). So, suddenly, when it might help them, the GPL turns out to be wonderful! Here's SCO's Memorandum in Opposition to IBM's Motion for Partial Summary Judgment on its Counterclaim for Copyright Infringement (Eighth Counterclaim) for your consideration. Note that they say:
19. SCO never repudiated the GPL, and it always endeavored to comply with its GPL obligations.
If SCO is unwilling to challenge the GPL, who does that leave us with to do the testing that you so much want to see? Find us a fool, or shut up about "it hasn't been tested in court."
Ok. I'm thinking of perl. I'm thinking about various systems I've seen and worked on over the last couple of decades. I'm thinking "fairly popular" is a pretty serious understatement when talking about perl. Tcl/Tk? Maybe not so much, but I've still seen lots and lots of it running behind the scenes on all sorts of systems. Python? Ok, I haven't seen much enterprise penetration there. Yet. But it's pretty new, relatively speaking. And it's already got zope, plone and gnue, and looks like it's only going to be growing from there. (Anyway, I can hope, 'cause python sure seems to me to suck less than perl, java, or tcl.)
Microsoft has cloned Java
From what I've seen, they haven't merely cloned it, they've actually improved on it. I know, a blasphemous thing to say on/., but I really don't care.
I think you have to explain your reasoning a bit here.
Ok. I didn't think it was that tricky of a thought, but since you ask.... Kaffe and gcj are not forked from each other, they're forked (very loosely speaking) from the design of their not-open-source predecessor. Nobody is trying to fork kaffe or gcj - they're already open source, so there's no particular reason to fork them. And if java had been open source from the start, there never would have been any reason to create these competing projects.
Ask anyone involved with either project (kaffe or gcj) if they would have even considered working on those projects if java had started as open source! If java had been open source there would be no kaffe or gjc! Period! I don't know how I can explain it any more clearly than that!
And, for that matter, if java were open-sourced, even at this late date, I would expect to see kaffe vanish almost instantly, and I wouldn't place any bets on gcj's long-term prospects.
That's nice, but if it's properly open-sourced (i.e. GPL), MSFT's not going to touch your "fork" with a ten-foot pole. So, you're not going to get rich quick or anything. And it's not going to gain you very much, since you already have the capability of building that system, since java supports linking to external libraries. So, you'll have this system that you'll use to...do what, exactly? Hey, good luck with your project, dude, hope you have fun.
Having support for COM/XPCOM/whatever has really destroyed perl and python, and made it so that there's no cross-platform code written in those languages. I'm sure it will destroy java just as thoroughly. Oh wait, did I leave off the <sarcasm> tags?
Let's see: we have kaffe, gcj, and a handful of other open source attempts to clone java, all of which are not exactly one-hundred percent compatible, and none of which would exist if java had been open source in the first place. We have MSFT pushing their own completely incompatible java-like system.
Now, lets look at some fairly popular languages that have been open-source since the beginning: perl, python, tcl, ruby. Gee, not one of them has shown the faintest sign of forking. My conclusion? Sun is run by a bunch of idiots. (Really too bad, because I used to be a big fan back in the eighties.)
The other posters' responses are more or less right on, but this may be an easier way to think about it: the GPL is a purely a defense against charges of copyright infringement. The legal part is: it will never come up in court except as a defense. (And it will probably never come up as a defense, because anyone who's actually complying with its terms is unlikely to be sued.) That is why it has never been tested in court. You don't sue someone for violating the GPL, you sue someone for violating your copyright, and they proffer the GPL in their defense, if they can. Which they presumably can't, or you wouldn't have brought the suit. Think of it as a limited-use get-out-of-lawsuit-free card that comes with the software.
Rephrase the question, as it really has nothing to do with the GPL. How can they tell that a binary has someone else's code in it?
Looking for strings is one mechanism (and the most obvious). Looking for particular quirks in the behavior is another, disassembling the code is another. There are people who are experts in looking for this sort of thing. Yes, there's a chance for false positives, but the chance is slimmer than you might imagine. And, the false postive will turn up in discovery, before the case gets off the ground, so that's no biggie. (That's kind of the whole point of having discovery, SCO's abuse of it notwithstanding.)
Easy to defeat GPL detection? Perhaps, but it would take work, and the whole point of using someone else's code is to save work. If you've got to do a massive rewrite to hide your theft, you're probably going to end up doing nearly as much work as if you wrote the code yourself from scratch. So what's the point?
Depends on many factors. Deliberate infringement of copyrights or patents is always worse than innocent, inadvertant infringement, though. And for-profit infringement is always worse than free. So the company would already be negotiating at a huge disadvantage, and with much more to lose. There are other factors (how broad the patent is, how important the GPL'd program is to the community at large), but in general, other things being equal, that would be a very risky, and probably losing, move by the infringing company.
The fact that there is so much redundancy in free software only strengthens the community's position in such a case, since dropping one project (at least until the patent can be worked around) will still probably leave several that do approximately the same thing. And you thought Gnome vs. KDE vs. Xfce vs. GNUStep was a bad thing!:)
I agree that the legitimate use of bittorrent is probably a minority (although it's ~100% of my use), but saying that it's a token minority is a whole nuther story. In general, a "token minority" implies that it's just there for show ("look, we don't discriminate against blacks - we even hired one!"). The illegal uses of BT may be a vast, vast majority, but that doesn't contradict the claim that the legitimate uses go far, far beyond merely being token.
Being one large file has disadvantages as well as disadvantages. It's generally a lot easier for a single file to get trashed than for a whole directory. And there's mbox's infamous "From" munging problem. And using, say, grep to find a particular message is a lot easier if the messages are in separate files. All of which is not to say I disagree with you - I still use mbox, and the reasons you list are among my reasons. I'm just saying that it is, I think, largely a matter of taste. How do you weight the tradeoffs? And as for those simple conversion tools - those work both ways.
I've been using mbox format since the eighties, and never had a problem with it on any platform. It's pretty much been THE standard for email for as long as email has existed. If I ever were to switch, I'd probably switch to maildir, which has nearly as wide-spread support these days.
Bah, even the average NON-computer user has at least heard the name Linux. I've heard it mentioned on mainstream sitcoms and skit shows. It's appeared in multiple cartoon strips in the daily newspapers (not just in Dilbert). Oh, and then there's the superbowl ad. There may still be a whole lot of people who don't know exactly what it is, but I think you'd have to search long and hard to find someone who hasn't at least heard of Linux.
YES!!! I was going to mod you insightful, but decided to post my enthusiastic agreement instead. The two-pronged approach, with the stable branch and the development branch, was one of the most amazing and innovative development models I'd seen in years, and it's proved itself time and time again, not just on the kernel but on other projects as well.
The 2.6 series has just been a mess. I upgraded briefly, but quickly retreated to 2.4. Frankly, if Linus doesn't go ahead and make himself a new playground/branch soon, I might try to get some motivated, like-minded developers together to try to create a stable branch off of 2.6 somewhere. Maybe we can call it 2.7, and force Linus and crew to jump to 2.8 when they want to make a new experimental branch.:)
The word you're looking for is "idiom". And I agree, (!ptr) is idiomatic. It's even introduced as a standard idiom in many C reference works and style guides. There are plenty of ways to abuse the sytax of C in order to produce unclear or unreadable code, but this is not one of them. If you don't instantly recognize the idiom, I don't think you can claim to even qualify as a novice C programmer yet. You might, just as fruitfully, claim that curly braces are not as clear as "BEGIN" and "END" for marking blocks. That may even be true - if you're completely unfamiliar with C (or its many cousins).
> It seems to me that their business model (sell a mediocre version of Unix on highly specialized machines to retailers) wasn't working well [...]
Um, that was another company entirely. That company (after changing their name to "Tarantella") is reportedly doing fairly well. SCO's original business model (back when they were named "Caldera") was: provide a "business-friendly" version of LINUX for the corporate market. And this business model has been remarkably effective for many companies. Nothing wrong with that business model at all. Its only real problem is that is doesn't provide enough of a get-rich-quick scheme to satisfy certain greedy bastards.
Lexmark has just been trying to hide the true price of printing with their printers, using a classic bait-and-switch con. If you don't actually want to do any printing, then I agree that their printers are quite cheap. But not buying a printer at all is even cheaper, in that case.:)
I'm not interested in just owning a printer. I'm interested in printing. The printer itself is just a tool towards that end. So I don't want it "both ways". I don't care about the price of the printer - I care about the cost of printing. The up-front cost of the printer itself is only a part of that cost, and, more often than not these days, a fairly small part.
The motivation for the printer mfg to sell hardware at low margins should be the same as it is in any other market: competition!
This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL.
The Common Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL.
For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)
No, Wine is developed for x86 systems that use X11. That includes Linux, BSD, Solaris, HURD, and possibly even Windows! (I don't know of anyone who's tried to get Wine to work under Windows, but I suspect it could be done, using, e.g. Cygwin.)
[...] a competing company.
Even if Wine were just for Linux, Linux is not a company. Even less are "x86 systems that support X11" a "competing company." While many of the companies that sell Linux are competing with MSFT, Linux itself is not - in fact, MSFT is free to modify/redistribute/sell Linux themselves, were they so inclined. It's not competition, it's part of the commons, and they have nobody but themselves to blame if they don't want to take advantage of that.
This is just simple business [...]
MSFT, as a convicted monopoly-abuser, no longer gets to operate by the rules of "simple business". In particular, requiring the use of official MS-brand Windows for updates to MS-Office and other applications almost certainly constitutes illegal product-tying. Thus, even if you were right about the stuff you said previously, you'd be wrong about this point.
I use Linux, thus, I wouldn't even notice any "copy-protection" schemes based on having Windows autostart files on the disc. I use cdparanoia to rip, and its anti-jitter, anti-scratch, error-correction features will probably blow past the remaining "copy-protection" schemes based on adding deliberate errors to the disc. Are they going to provide me with tools to detect the presence of "copy protection" that I otherwise wouldn't even be able to notice? Or are they simply planning to outlaw Linux?
This legislation seems insane and miguided (at least from the/. summary, which I realize isn't a reliable guide to what's actually been proposed). I hope that European Free Software and Consumers' Rights groups are all over this one.
I wrote, "[i]n the early days of KDE/Gnome development, neither Qt nor GTK could be used for developing Winapps." Of course, what I meant to say was that neither one could be used for developing Free/OSS Winapps. Sorry about that.
Disclaimer: I prefer Tk for cross-platform GUI apps, and don't use Gnome or KDE on my Linux desktop, so I'm reasonably neutral, but possibly not as up-to-date on all the quirks of each system as some. But nevertheless, it seems to me that this simply maintains parity between the two systems.
In the early days of KDE/Gnome development, neither Qt nor GTK could be used for developing Winapps - Qt because the license for the Win version didn't allow it, and GTK because GTK didn't run on Win. Now, the GTK port for Win has (reportedly) become fairly mature, and GTK apps are starting to appear on Win. So with this move, the same GPL'd Qt/KDE apps that exist on Linux can begin to appear on Win as well, maintaining the balance between the two systems. All the other advantages and disadvantages of each system continue unchanged.
Personally, I think the competition between these two systems is a good thing. (Among other things, I think it increases the chances that one or the other will eventually evolve into something I'd want to use.) So I definitely applaud this move by Trolltech. Plus, it's a classy thing to do - Trolltech definitely seems to understand the issues a lot better than they used to. It may just be a case of "keeping up with the Joneses," but it's still a classy move.
Base 36 has been used for decades. The three-letter airport codes (ATL, LAX, JFK, etc.) were designed for base-36 encoding. Forth programmers and bc programmers have been using this sort of "trick" since before MS existed. (Forth and bc have a variable that defines the base for input/output conversion) The only thing I see that's even vaguely original is omitting the vowels, in a (vain) attempt to avoid "naughty" words. And I'm really not convinced that's innovative enough to deserve a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Less than 0.5% of traffic involved legal and/or appropriate downloads.
That's fine, as long as you make it clear why you have the policy you do, and don't try to make up silly excuses about how "P2P hasn't been ruled legal". I'd say you guys are doing exactly the right thing, with one minor quibble:
if students have something they wish to download that is only available via torrent, the computing staff will do it for them.
The primary purpose of BT is to save bandwidth for the uploader. Some people may provide alternate access methods, but strongly request that people use BT to keep the bandwidth costs down. I would recommend that you change the "that is only available via torrent" policy to "where preferred access is via torrent". Otherwise, you are punishing third parties for no particular reason.
But as I say, that's a minor quibble. Otherwise, perfect.
You still haven't answered my question: why do you think code is different from CDs/movies/books? So let me ask it one more time. Why do you think code is different from CDs/movies/books? Maybe I'm not making myself clear: what possible reason could you have for thinking that copyright laws don't apply to source code the way that they apply to CDs/books/movies?
While OT, i also do what i please with CDs and movies.
Well, at least you're consistent. You still haven't explained why you think there's a difference between those CDs and movies and code, though. In the eyes of the law, they are all equally copyrighted.
Sorry, but no i wont volunteer to goto court. Its too costly, even when you win.
I will gladly volunteer to pick up all your court costs if you win! I bet dozens of others here would do the same. (It's a pretty safe thing for me to volunteer, since, according to the lawyers I've talked to, your chance of winning is zero.) If you really, truly believe you can win, well, now you have no barriers to trying. So go ahead and volunteer. Put up or shut up.
Cant prove I agreed to any restricting license for code that was RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC.
Most copyrighted materials ARE released to the public. Source code is a rare exception. Book, movies, music - pretty much all of it gets "RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC." No "restricting license" needed, because that material is covered by copyright law. Just as source code is covered by copyright law.
You released it, you don't have any confirmable controlls on it.. It's mine to do as I please.
By that "logic", the latest CDs and movies are all yours to do with as you please as well. Do you really think that logic is going to fly in a court of law? If so, please get in touch with Eben Moglen. He's been looking for someone foolish enough to challenge the GPL for nearly two decades. And you sound like just the kind of fool he had in mind.
No, but if you find someone willing to be the defendant in such a case, please let Eben Moglen know. He's been trying to find someone that foolish for many, many years now. The problem is that when people who have been violating the GPL talk to their lawyers, they quickly settle, rather than taking the case to court. It's almost as if the lawyers for the opposition think the GPL is just too strong to challenge.
The fact that the courts have never had to enforce the GPL should say all that needs to be said. Oh, except in Germany, where the GPL was upheld by the courts recently. Don't try this trick in Germany, no matter how foolish you are.
The SCO/IBM thing has not fizzled out - it's just going through a tedious series of delays. But, at the moment, SCO is now fervently claiming that they have complied with the terms of the GPL, even though they were running around and calling it unconstitutional, unenforcable and void. (Guess their lawyers finally had a look.) Their current position (in court at least) is that, despite all the nonsense they spouted, they are still entitled to use the GPL themselves as a defense against charges of copyright infringement (which is really all the GPL is). So, suddenly, when it might help them, the GPL turns out to be wonderful! Here's SCO's Memorandum in Opposition to IBM's Motion for Partial Summary Judgment on its Counterclaim for Copyright Infringement (Eighth Counterclaim) for your consideration. Note that they say: If SCO is unwilling to challenge the GPL, who does that leave us with to do the testing that you so much want to see? Find us a fool, or shut up about "it hasn't been tested in court."
Think about the "fairly popular" bit.
/., but I really don't care.
Ok. I'm thinking of perl. I'm thinking about various systems I've seen and worked on over the last couple of decades. I'm thinking "fairly popular" is a pretty serious understatement when talking about perl. Tcl/Tk? Maybe not so much, but I've still seen lots and lots of it running behind the scenes on all sorts of systems. Python? Ok, I haven't seen much enterprise penetration there. Yet. But it's pretty new, relatively speaking. And it's already got zope, plone and gnue, and looks like it's only going to be growing from there. (Anyway, I can hope, 'cause python sure seems to me to suck less than perl, java, or tcl.)
Microsoft has cloned Java
From what I've seen, they haven't merely cloned it, they've actually improved on it. I know, a blasphemous thing to say on
I think you have to explain your reasoning a bit here.
Ok. I didn't think it was that tricky of a thought, but since you ask.... Kaffe and gcj are not forked from each other, they're forked (very loosely speaking) from the design of their not-open-source predecessor. Nobody is trying to fork kaffe or gcj - they're already open source, so there's no particular reason to fork them. And if java had been open source from the start, there never would have been any reason to create these competing projects.
Ask anyone involved with either project (kaffe or gcj) if they would have even considered working on those projects if java had started as open source! If java had been open source there would be no kaffe or gjc! Period! I don't know how I can explain it any more clearly than that!
And, for that matter, if java were open-sourced, even at this late date, I would expect to see kaffe vanish almost instantly, and I wouldn't place any bets on gcj's long-term prospects.
That's nice, but if it's properly open-sourced (i.e. GPL), MSFT's not going to touch your "fork" with a ten-foot pole. So, you're not going to get rich quick or anything. And it's not going to gain you very much, since you already have the capability of building that system, since java supports linking to external libraries. So, you'll have this system that you'll use to...do what, exactly? Hey, good luck with your project, dude, hope you have fun.
Having support for COM/XPCOM/whatever has really destroyed perl and python, and made it so that there's no cross-platform code written in those languages. I'm sure it will destroy java just as thoroughly. Oh wait, did I leave off the <sarcasm> tags?
Let's see: we have kaffe, gcj, and a handful of other open source attempts to clone java, all of which are not exactly one-hundred percent compatible, and none of which would exist if java had been open source in the first place. We have MSFT pushing their own completely incompatible java-like system.
Now, lets look at some fairly popular languages that have been open-source since the beginning: perl, python, tcl, ruby. Gee, not one of them has shown the faintest sign of forking. My conclusion? Sun is run by a bunch of idiots. (Really too bad, because I used to be a big fan back in the eighties.)
The other posters' responses are more or less right on, but this may be an easier way to think about it: the GPL is a purely a defense against charges of copyright infringement. The legal part is: it will never come up in court except as a defense. (And it will probably never come up as a defense, because anyone who's actually complying with its terms is unlikely to be sued.) That is why it has never been tested in court. You don't sue someone for violating the GPL, you sue someone for violating your copyright, and they proffer the GPL in their defense, if they can. Which they presumably can't, or you wouldn't have brought the suit. Think of it as a limited-use get-out-of-lawsuit-free card that comes with the software.
Rephrase the question, as it really has nothing to do with the GPL. How can they tell that a binary has someone else's code in it?
Looking for strings is one mechanism (and the most obvious). Looking for particular quirks in the behavior is another, disassembling the code is another. There are people who are experts in looking for this sort of thing. Yes, there's a chance for false positives, but the chance is slimmer than you might imagine. And, the false postive will turn up in discovery, before the case gets off the ground, so that's no biggie. (That's kind of the whole point of having discovery, SCO's abuse of it notwithstanding.)
Easy to defeat GPL detection? Perhaps, but it would take work, and the whole point of using someone else's code is to save work. If you've got to do a massive rewrite to hide your theft, you're probably going to end up doing nearly as much work as if you wrote the code yourself from scratch. So what's the point?
Depends on many factors. Deliberate infringement of copyrights or patents is always worse than innocent, inadvertant infringement, though. And for-profit infringement is always worse than free. So the company would already be negotiating at a huge disadvantage, and with much more to lose. There are other factors (how broad the patent is, how important the GPL'd program is to the community at large), but in general, other things being equal, that would be a very risky, and probably losing, move by the infringing company.
:)
The fact that there is so much redundancy in free software only strengthens the community's position in such a case, since dropping one project (at least until the patent can be worked around) will still probably leave several that do approximately the same thing. And you thought Gnome vs. KDE vs. Xfce vs. GNUStep was a bad thing!
I agree that the legitimate use of bittorrent is probably a minority (although it's ~100% of my use), but saying that it's a token minority is a whole nuther story. In general, a "token minority" implies that it's just there for show ("look, we don't discriminate against blacks - we even hired one!"). The illegal uses of BT may be a vast, vast majority, but that doesn't contradict the claim that the legitimate uses go far, far beyond merely being token.
Being one large file has disadvantages as well as disadvantages. It's generally a lot easier for a single file to get trashed than for a whole directory. And there's mbox's infamous "From" munging problem. And using, say, grep to find a particular message is a lot easier if the messages are in separate files. All of which is not to say I disagree with you - I still use mbox, and the reasons you list are among my reasons. I'm just saying that it is, I think, largely a matter of taste. How do you weight the tradeoffs? And as for those simple conversion tools - those work both ways.
I've been using mbox format since the eighties, and never had a problem with it on any platform. It's pretty much been THE standard for email for as long as email has existed. If I ever were to switch, I'd probably switch to maildir, which has nearly as wide-spread support these days.
Bah, even the average NON-computer user has at least heard the name Linux. I've heard it mentioned on mainstream sitcoms and skit shows. It's appeared in multiple cartoon strips in the daily newspapers (not just in Dilbert). Oh, and then there's the superbowl ad. There may still be a whole lot of people who don't know exactly what it is, but I think you'd have to search long and hard to find someone who hasn't at least heard of Linux.
YES!!! I was going to mod you insightful, but decided to post my enthusiastic agreement instead. The two-pronged approach, with the stable branch and the development branch, was one of the most amazing and innovative development models I'd seen in years, and it's proved itself time and time again, not just on the kernel but on other projects as well.
:)
The 2.6 series has just been a mess. I upgraded briefly, but quickly retreated to 2.4. Frankly, if Linus doesn't go ahead and make himself a new playground/branch soon, I might try to get some motivated, like-minded developers together to try to create a stable branch off of 2.6 somewhere. Maybe we can call it 2.7, and force Linus and crew to jump to 2.8 when they want to make a new experimental branch.
The word you're looking for is "idiom". And I agree, (!ptr) is idiomatic. It's even introduced as a standard idiom in many C reference works and style guides. There are plenty of ways to abuse the sytax of C in order to produce unclear or unreadable code, but this is not one of them. If you don't instantly recognize the idiom, I don't think you can claim to even qualify as a novice C programmer yet. You might, just as fruitfully, claim that curly braces are not as clear as "BEGIN" and "END" for marking blocks. That may even be true - if you're completely unfamiliar with C (or its many cousins).
> It seems to me that their business model (sell a mediocre version of Unix on highly specialized machines to retailers) wasn't working well [...]
Um, that was another company entirely. That company (after changing their name to "Tarantella") is reportedly doing fairly well. SCO's original business model (back when they were named "Caldera") was: provide a "business-friendly" version of LINUX for the corporate market. And this business model has been remarkably effective for many companies. Nothing wrong with that business model at all. Its only real problem is that is doesn't provide enough of a get-rich-quick scheme to satisfy certain greedy bastards.
Lexmark has just been trying to hide the true price of printing with their printers, using a classic bait-and-switch con. If you don't actually want to do any printing, then I agree that their printers are quite cheap. But not buying a printer at all is even cheaper, in that case. :)
I'm not interested in just owning a printer. I'm interested in printing. The printer itself is just a tool towards that end. So I don't want it "both ways". I don't care about the price of the printer - I care about the cost of printing. The up-front cost of the printer itself is only a part of that cost, and, more often than not these days, a fairly small part.
The motivation for the printer mfg to sell hardware at low margins should be the same as it is in any other market: competition!
From the FSF's license comment page:
Emphasis mine.
Wine is developed for Linux [...]
:)
No, Wine is developed for x86 systems that use X11. That includes Linux, BSD, Solaris, HURD, and possibly even Windows! (I don't know of anyone who's tried to get Wine to work under Windows, but I suspect it could be done, using, e.g. Cygwin.)
[...] a competing company.
Even if Wine were just for Linux, Linux is not a company. Even less are "x86 systems that support X11" a "competing company." While many of the companies that sell Linux are competing with MSFT, Linux itself is not - in fact, MSFT is free to modify/redistribute/sell Linux themselves, were they so inclined. It's not competition, it's part of the commons, and they have nobody but themselves to blame if they don't want to take advantage of that.
This is just simple business [...]
MSFT, as a convicted monopoly-abuser, no longer gets to operate by the rules of "simple business". In particular, requiring the use of official MS-brand Windows for updates to MS-Office and other applications almost certainly constitutes illegal product-tying. Thus, even if you were right about the stuff you said previously, you'd be wrong about this point.
[...] though a bad move by Microsoft.
At last! Something we agree on!
I use Linux, thus, I wouldn't even notice any "copy-protection" schemes based on having Windows autostart files on the disc. I use cdparanoia to rip, and its anti-jitter, anti-scratch, error-correction features will probably blow past the remaining "copy-protection" schemes based on adding deliberate errors to the disc. Are they going to provide me with tools to detect the presence of "copy protection" that I otherwise wouldn't even be able to notice? Or are they simply planning to outlaw Linux?
/. summary, which I realize isn't a reliable guide to what's actually been proposed). I hope that European Free Software and Consumers' Rights groups are all over this one.
This legislation seems insane and miguided (at least from the
I wrote, "[i]n the early days of KDE/Gnome development, neither Qt nor GTK could be used for developing Winapps." Of course, what I meant to say was that neither one could be used for developing Free/OSS Winapps. Sorry about that.
Disclaimer: I prefer Tk for cross-platform GUI apps, and don't use Gnome or KDE on my Linux desktop, so I'm reasonably neutral, but possibly not as up-to-date on all the quirks of each system as some. But nevertheless, it seems to me that this simply maintains parity between the two systems.
In the early days of KDE/Gnome development, neither Qt nor GTK could be used for developing Winapps - Qt because the license for the Win version didn't allow it, and GTK because GTK didn't run on Win. Now, the GTK port for Win has (reportedly) become fairly mature, and GTK apps are starting to appear on Win. So with this move, the same GPL'd Qt/KDE apps that exist on Linux can begin to appear on Win as well, maintaining the balance between the two systems. All the other advantages and disadvantages of each system continue unchanged.
Personally, I think the competition between these two systems is a good thing. (Among other things, I think it increases the chances that one or the other will eventually evolve into something I'd want to use.) So I definitely applaud this move by Trolltech. Plus, it's a classy thing to do - Trolltech definitely seems to understand the issues a lot better than they used to. It may just be a case of "keeping up with the Joneses," but it's still a classy move.
Base 36 has been used for decades. The three-letter airport codes (ATL, LAX, JFK, etc.) were designed for base-36 encoding. Forth programmers and bc programmers have been using this sort of "trick" since before MS existed. (Forth and bc have a variable that defines the base for input/output conversion) The only thing I see that's even vaguely original is omitting the vowels, in a (vain) attempt to avoid "naughty" words. And I'm really not convinced that's innovative enough to deserve a patent.