If I were to go out and find a copy of the Windows source code that was leaked a while back and put some of it in to my program then I have 'infected' my IP in precisely the same way.
I don't have the OPTION of relicensing my code, because MS does not find that an acceptable solution, but my other options are the same.
Relicensing your code is one possible remedy to a copyright violation when the GPL is involved. Would you prefer it if the GPL denied you this option and always demanded royalties? You might say "But then no one would use the code in the first place!" and while you'd be wrong you prove the point: You are not obliged to poison your own code with someone else's copyrighted code. If you choose to do so you *must* have some agreement with the copyright holder. The copyright holders who use the GPL are so nice about it that they do not even require you to talk to them, they simply say that they are willing to license their code for your use if you license the resulting work in a particular way. You are free to decline! If you find someone else's code in your work that has entered in to it accidentally then you are free to remove said code and (possibly) pay a penalty, whether the code was under the GPL or had no license at all.
The GPL simply gives you, the developer, ADDITIONAL options above what copyright law normally allows. You are free to not exercise those options.
I am familiar with the GPL and the section you quoted. I don't find your argument convincing. Though android uses Linux and gets some value from that the Linux kernel specifically is not required and does not give android something that another similar kernel would not. There is, as I understand it, an established principle that userspace programs calling public kernel APIs does not constitute derived works under the GPL, I think the FSF has said as much in approximately as many words.
It is in no way necessary for userspace to comply with the kernel's license. Windows apps are not derivative works of the Windows kernel, either.
Unless you're saying that the integration between kernel and non-kernel stuff is significantly different for Android than for a typical Linux setup then I do not believe your points is valid. If that is what you meant you communicated it poorly. If you think that all programs running on Linux in general should be considered derived works then please take your FUD somewhere else.
You are saying that the userland should "comply with" GPLv2, implying that the kernel license and the userland license have something to do with one another.
The original poster to whom you replied was commenting that google used the netbsd userland for android because it is under the BSD license, unlike the typical Linux userland which would be GPLv2 or GPLv3 depending on which version you got (and when). What has this to do with the kernel license? That's right! Nothing. So what are you saying if you are not attempting to imply that the license of user space programs must be (or ought to be) compliant with that of the kernel?
Nexenta is superficially similar in end result, but it is not part of the Debian project and thus is not at all comparable. It is Solaris plus some Debian stuff, instead of Debian on top of a Solaris kernel (as Debian is on top of FreeBSD now).
"My [unreleased Microsoft software] is [theoretically superior] to your [available and fully released software]."
This covers all MS marketing from the dawn of time.
"Don't buy our competitor, we're working on a product which will blow theirs away!"
Every time, in every market, this is their script. When will people learn?
In the case of IE8 performance, what they don't mention is that page render time is mostly irrelevant. The difference between the most performant and least performant browsers are not significant on modern hardware. What you'll really notice--and where Firefox is far ahead of *released* versions of IE--is JavaScript performance. Almost every site of modest complexity uses *some* javascript, these days, and 'web app' sites use a *lot*.
It's the old "benchmark something irrelevant" trick. Gives good numbers, fools the uninitiated.
And how would you contact a company except by sending them email? If I want to contact a company I'll find their web site, find a contact link and send an email. I cannot imagine what else you might do. Same procedure except finding and calling a phone number might be an option, but it is even less likely you'd get an intelligent result.
I've been running and incrementally upgrading the same install since potato, so I know where you're coming from.
That said, there are certain times where you can install packages that put your system in to a state such that you cannot later recover without manual depends fixing. I've done it a couple times during transitions: cleanly upgraded to a transition package, waited too long and had the transition->normal sequence pass me by. The end result can be a bit complicated to resolve, usually involving removal of a subset of packages just to avoid running in circles (aptitude makes all of this so much easier!)
Maybe if you're not crazy and don't do what I do--namely install tons of packages--you wont have as many problems. I still would not recommend sid to anyone who isn't comfortable with dropping to a terminal and fixing it by hand.
While I've been using Ubuntu for it's ease of use in recent years and see Debian more as a kind of building kit when I need a more customized Linux setup
This was, as I understand it, always what Debian was intended to be: a building block for other distributions. Debian and its package pool is only a base, with a casual reference disc for getting a look at the system. Actual distributions should pick a specific set of packages, configure them a specific way and release that... but continue to pull Debian packages from Debian mirrors, not do what Ubuntu did and repackage everything. What a colossal waste of time! 90% of Ubuntu could have been achieved by merely supplying an extra package source with a few updated packages and some pinnings which make those packages take precedence over the Debian ones.
Unstable is really only for people who know how to fix the broken dependency issues which you certainly/will/ encounter, sooner or later. At times (such as just before a major release) unstable is not very bad, merely frequently updated as you say, but at other times (such as during a libc transition or just after a major release aka now) it breaks quite alarmingly and you simply have to be able to recover it yourself.
Testing is another matter. The probability that you will unrecoverably break your system in testing is almost always low, though sometimes if you try to install something dependencies wont resolve nicely. Just watch the Removed: count and don't do it if it doesn't look reasonable and you'll be fine.
You say at as a joke but I have used mplayer -vo caca to watch porn while waiting for video driver downloads and compiles to finish. It's really not so bad, but some imagination is required.
Even the corporate Symantec AV is a bloated, horrid piece of junk compared with e.g. AVG. I've never used the consumer version... if it's worse than the corporate version, I cannot imagine how.
For the longest time gmc was the finest graphical file manager for Linux and has in some ways yet to be surpassed. I remember when Nautilus was just an announcement and all good GNOME users used gmc. It worked well, it was *fast*! It had none of the problems Nautilus still has.
I went looking for a new version last year, having for the first time in a while a need for a GUI file manager, only to find that the gmc stuff had been removed from mc! I am shocked, dismayed and saddened.
If anyone is doing mc again, please look in to re-adding gmc.
I say you were quoting. You were quoting the movie "Aliens".
The person who replied to you provided the precise quote from the film. It was on the subject of how to deal with the alien threat on the planet. Whether you know that's where it came from or not that is what you were referencing.
But I was *specifically* suggesting the creation of a substitute for MS Word which uses TeX as its disk format. I don't want something which is a usable GUI for LaTeX, I want something which your average grandma letter writer can sit down and use in two minutes which unbeknownst to her uses TeX. I want to look as much like Word as possible, keeping in mind that it should not duplicate it where doing so makes things harder than not doing so. I want something easy, familiar, and painless that lets the user just write like they do now and allow them to explore the greater power available only if they want more advanced functionality.
LyX is no good because you still need to know LaTeX to really use it. Its workflow isn't like that of Word, or Pages, or Writer, or KWord, or any other 'traditional' word processor. And this is because it *isn't* a word processor and doesn't try to be. I want a program that is a word processor, which uses TeX in the background, and which allows but does not require you to do things in a more advanced way.
The discussion was about formats which will still work after a decade, originally, when the post you referred to said to use TeX, which I think is a good idea. You did assume that this meant learning TeX, but as I said it is not necessary to learn TeX if only someone would create a useful WYSIWYG GUI for it instead of mucking about with the debatably useful MS Word clones that we keep getting.
I knew someone would mention LyX. Only the naive would call lyx a replacement for e.g. MS Word, or even WYSIWYG at all. It is superior (in terms of usability) to direct editing of the markup, and it's certainly a step in the right direction, but when it comes to general use for productivity it's miles away from ready. LyX is no where near/simple/ enough for someone who doesn't know anything, doesn't care to learn anything and just wants something slightly more convenient than pen and paper: sit down, start writing, later format a bit, print.
In fact I always removed the toolbars from previous versions.
Collapsed is inferior to gone. One irritating thing is that I always take the time to go through every option I can find of every application I use, and in that respect O2k7 is frustratingly different and time consuming. So much has changed I had to do it all again!
Most people, I expect, never toggle any of the options. This is why sensible defaults are so important, but nobody really seems to care.
Is it obvious? I don't think so. The original post you replied to said "Use TeX" and also said that an office "suite" was a stupid thing to want. The latter is opinion and really quite irrelevant and what you said in your post was a reply to the suggestion to use TeX, so I shall ignore it. You objected saying that users should not have to learn a programming language (which is quite right) and I replied that a WYSIWYG word processor for TeX would be good solution for those users. So far it appears that we are all on topic and no one is misunderstanding anyone's meaning.
So, please tell me what it is the post you were referring to meant if it did not mean "use TeX" and did not mean "office suites are a bad idea."
Microsoft seems to assume that people interact with Office by clicking a lot. Perhaps this happens in Excel, or more likely Powerpoint, but in Word everyone I know uses the keyboard for 99% of everything. Who clicks buttons and menus? I honestly couldn't say. I never noticed print was missing until this thread, because ALT+F+P still works.
The new UI is ugly and putting a different set of larger buttons in my face improves usability by about 0%.
TeX would be an excellent format for a WYSIWYG editor to save in to. It would not be possible with the WYSIWYG to do all of the nice things you can do with TeX, but as long as it saves down to this common, malleable format a broad amount of compatibility is achieved for free. Let the users who want to learn nothing use a simple GUI tool which produces code which can be tweaked by hand, or by other existing tools, when needed.
This looks interesting. I've only taken a quick look so I could be off-base here, but
1: This doesn't solve the security problem
2: This still suffers the cross-platform compatibility problem.
3: No matter how perfect a solution this is, the web UI remains the reality today. Perhaps if this is as good as the link suggests it will one day supplant the web UI for network centric apps, but today it is nothing and makes no difference to my earlier comments.
I'll look at it more after I've read the pdf. It's certainly cool and I like cool, new things.
Are we really having this/pointless/ conversation?
Let me re-write my initial statement so as to remove some of the ambiguity you seem to be having trouble coping with.
It is the very readiness of the people who represent, claim to represent or seek to represent the conservative-minded, non-liberal, non-progressive "right" point of view to lie to the stupid and, during the presidency of George W. Bush up to but not necessarily including the last 12 months, the reluctance of people who are representing or are seeking to represent or are claiming to represent the liberal-minded, non-conservative or "left" point of view to lie to the stupid which has lead to the supposedly "right leaning" political landscape we the public have been told we have in the USA. Reagan, for example, told comforting lies about economics. No matter how well or poorly the reader may or may not think Reagan performed as president he did what good politicians do: Tell the lie that gets the most votes. Obama isn't as good as the right has been during the duration of the presidency of George W. Bush at telling (or constructing?) the kinds of enticing lies which the stupid will believe and which will make getting elected easier and which the right has been willing to use during the duration of the presidency of George W. Bush, but Obama, moreso than others supposedly of the aforementioned left during the aforementioned time period, has never the less used the tactic of lying to people (some of whom I presume to be stupid for falling for those things he said which were lies) and has in the end gotten the same result as Reagan: he has been elected president of the United States.
Obama *may* represent an end to the left *not* employing the tactic of lying to the stupid to win elections. So far I have insufficient data to feel secure in making an assertion one way or another.
Did I spell it out in sufficient detail this time? I think my meaning was pretty clear originally, but if you insist on trying to find some kind of contradiction in what I said originally or my clarified version above I would be happy to re-clarify until the sun burns out.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Ken Thompson.
If I were to go out and find a copy of the Windows source code that was leaked a while back and put some of it in to my program then I have 'infected' my IP in precisely the same way.
I don't have the OPTION of relicensing my code, because MS does not find that an acceptable solution, but my other options are the same.
Relicensing your code is one possible remedy to a copyright violation when the GPL is involved. Would you prefer it if the GPL denied you this option and always demanded royalties? You might say "But then no one would use the code in the first place!" and while you'd be wrong you prove the point: You are not obliged to poison your own code with someone else's copyrighted code. If you choose to do so you *must* have some agreement with the copyright holder. The copyright holders who use the GPL are so nice about it that they do not even require you to talk to them, they simply say that they are willing to license their code for your use if you license the resulting work in a particular way. You are free to decline! If you find someone else's code in your work that has entered in to it accidentally then you are free to remove said code and (possibly) pay a penalty, whether the code was under the GPL or had no license at all.
The GPL simply gives you, the developer, ADDITIONAL options above what copyright law normally allows. You are free to not exercise those options.
I am familiar with the GPL and the section you quoted. I don't find your argument convincing. Though android uses Linux and gets some value from that the Linux kernel specifically is not required and does not give android something that another similar kernel would not. There is, as I understand it, an established principle that userspace programs calling public kernel APIs does not constitute derived works under the GPL, I think the FSF has said as much in approximately as many words.
It is in no way necessary for userspace to comply with the kernel's license. Windows apps are not derivative works of the Windows kernel, either.
Unless you're saying that the integration between kernel and non-kernel stuff is significantly different for Android than for a typical Linux setup then I do not believe your points is valid. If that is what you meant you communicated it poorly. If you think that all programs running on Linux in general should be considered derived works then please take your FUD somewhere else.
You are saying that the userland should "comply with" GPLv2, implying that the kernel license and the userland license have something to do with one another.
The original poster to whom you replied was commenting that google used the netbsd userland for android because it is under the BSD license, unlike the typical Linux userland which would be GPLv2 or GPLv3 depending on which version you got (and when). What has this to do with the kernel license? That's right! Nothing. So what are you saying if you are not attempting to imply that the license of user space programs must be (or ought to be) compliant with that of the kernel?
Are you spreading misinformation deliberately or are you just tragically uninformed?
Nexenta is superficially similar in end result, but it is not part of the Debian project and thus is not at all comparable. It is Solaris plus some Debian stuff, instead of Debian on top of a Solaris kernel (as Debian is on top of FreeBSD now).
More like:
"My [unreleased Microsoft software] is [theoretically superior] to your [available and fully released software]."
This covers all MS marketing from the dawn of time.
"Don't buy our competitor, we're working on a product which will blow theirs away!"
Every time, in every market, this is their script. When will people learn?
In the case of IE8 performance, what they don't mention is that page render time is mostly irrelevant. The difference between the most performant and least performant browsers are not significant on modern hardware. What you'll really notice--and where Firefox is far ahead of *released* versions of IE--is JavaScript performance. Almost every site of modest complexity uses *some* javascript, these days, and 'web app' sites use a *lot*.
It's the old "benchmark something irrelevant" trick. Gives good numbers, fools the uninitiated.
And how would you contact a company except by sending them email? If I want to contact a company I'll find their web site, find a contact link and send an email. I cannot imagine what else you might do. Same procedure except finding and calling a phone number might be an option, but it is even less likely you'd get an intelligent result.
I've been running and incrementally upgrading the same install since potato, so I know where you're coming from.
That said, there are certain times where you can install packages that put your system in to a state such that you cannot later recover without manual depends fixing. I've done it a couple times during transitions: cleanly upgraded to a transition package, waited too long and had the transition->normal sequence pass me by. The end result can be a bit complicated to resolve, usually involving removal of a subset of packages just to avoid running in circles (aptitude makes all of this so much easier!)
Maybe if you're not crazy and don't do what I do--namely install tons of packages--you wont have as many problems. I still would not recommend sid to anyone who isn't comfortable with dropping to a terminal and fixing it by hand.
While I've been using Ubuntu for it's ease of use in recent years and see Debian more as a kind of building kit when I need a more customized Linux setup
This was, as I understand it, always what Debian was intended to be: a building block for other distributions. Debian and its package pool is only a base, with a casual reference disc for getting a look at the system. Actual distributions should pick a specific set of packages, configure them a specific way and release that... but continue to pull Debian packages from Debian mirrors, not do what Ubuntu did and repackage everything. What a colossal waste of time! 90% of Ubuntu could have been achieved by merely supplying an extra package source with a few updated packages and some pinnings which make those packages take precedence over the Debian ones.
Unstable is really only for people who know how to fix the broken dependency issues which you certainly /will/ encounter, sooner or later. At times (such as just before a major release) unstable is not very bad, merely frequently updated as you say, but at other times (such as during a libc transition or just after a major release aka now) it breaks quite alarmingly and you simply have to be able to recover it yourself.
Testing is another matter. The probability that you will unrecoverably break your system in testing is almost always low, though sometimes if you try to install something dependencies wont resolve nicely. Just watch the Removed: count and don't do it if it doesn't look reasonable and you'll be fine.
You say at as a joke but I have used mplayer -vo caca to watch porn while waiting for video driver downloads and compiles to finish. It's really not so bad, but some imagination is required.
Even the corporate Symantec AV is a bloated, horrid piece of junk compared with e.g. AVG. I've never used the consumer version... if it's worse than the corporate version, I cannot imagine how.
For the longest time gmc was the finest graphical file manager for Linux and has in some ways yet to be surpassed. I remember when Nautilus was just an announcement and all good GNOME users used gmc. It worked well, it was *fast*! It had none of the problems Nautilus still has.
I went looking for a new version last year, having for the first time in a while a need for a GUI file manager, only to find that the gmc stuff had been removed from mc! I am shocked, dismayed and saddened.
If anyone is doing mc again, please look in to re-adding gmc.
Joking? I hope so...
I say you were quoting. You were quoting the movie "Aliens".
The person who replied to you provided the precise quote from the film. It was on the subject of how to deal with the alien threat on the planet. Whether you know that's where it came from or not that is what you were referencing.
But I was *specifically* suggesting the creation of a substitute for MS Word which uses TeX as its disk format. I don't want something which is a usable GUI for LaTeX, I want something which your average grandma letter writer can sit down and use in two minutes which unbeknownst to her uses TeX. I want to look as much like Word as possible, keeping in mind that it should not duplicate it where doing so makes things harder than not doing so. I want something easy, familiar, and painless that lets the user just write like they do now and allow them to explore the greater power available only if they want more advanced functionality.
LyX is no good because you still need to know LaTeX to really use it. Its workflow isn't like that of Word, or Pages, or Writer, or KWord, or any other 'traditional' word processor. And this is because it *isn't* a word processor and doesn't try to be. I want a program that is a word processor, which uses TeX in the background, and which allows but does not require you to do things in a more advanced way.
The discussion was about formats which will still work after a decade, originally, when the post you referred to said to use TeX, which I think is a good idea. You did assume that this meant learning TeX, but as I said it is not necessary to learn TeX if only someone would create a useful WYSIWYG GUI for it instead of mucking about with the debatably useful MS Word clones that we keep getting.
I knew someone would mention LyX. Only the naive would call lyx a replacement for e.g. MS Word, or even WYSIWYG at all. It is superior (in terms of usability) to direct editing of the markup, and it's certainly a step in the right direction, but when it comes to general use for productivity it's miles away from ready. LyX is no where near /simple/ enough for someone who doesn't know anything, doesn't care to learn anything and just wants something slightly more convenient than pen and paper: sit down, start writing, later format a bit, print.
In fact I always removed the toolbars from previous versions.
Collapsed is inferior to gone. One irritating thing is that I always take the time to go through every option I can find of every application I use, and in that respect O2k7 is frustratingly different and time consuming. So much has changed I had to do it all again!
Most people, I expect, never toggle any of the options. This is why sensible defaults are so important, but nobody really seems to care.
Is it obvious? I don't think so. The original post you replied to said "Use TeX" and also said that an office "suite" was a stupid thing to want. The latter is opinion and really quite irrelevant and what you said in your post was a reply to the suggestion to use TeX, so I shall ignore it. You objected saying that users should not have to learn a programming language (which is quite right) and I replied that a WYSIWYG word processor for TeX would be good solution for those users. So far it appears that we are all on topic and no one is misunderstanding anyone's meaning.
So, please tell me what it is the post you were referring to meant if it did not mean "use TeX" and did not mean "office suites are a bad idea."
My experience is completely different from yours!
Microsoft seems to assume that people interact with Office by clicking a lot. Perhaps this happens in Excel, or more likely Powerpoint, but in Word everyone I know uses the keyboard for 99% of everything. Who clicks buttons and menus? I honestly couldn't say. I never noticed print was missing until this thread, because ALT+F+P still works.
The new UI is ugly and putting a different set of larger buttons in my face improves usability by about 0%.
It will be interesting to see when free software follows suit this time.
Fixed it for ya.
TeX would be an excellent format for a WYSIWYG editor to save in to. It would not be possible with the WYSIWYG to do all of the nice things you can do with TeX, but as long as it saves down to this common, malleable format a broad amount of compatibility is achieved for free. Let the users who want to learn nothing use a simple GUI tool which produces code which can be tweaked by hand, or by other existing tools, when needed.
Why not?
This looks interesting. I've only taken a quick look so I could be off-base here, but
1: This doesn't solve the security problem
2: This still suffers the cross-platform compatibility problem.
3: No matter how perfect a solution this is, the web UI remains the reality today. Perhaps if this is as good as the link suggests it will one day supplant the web UI for network centric apps, but today it is nothing and makes no difference to my earlier comments.
I'll look at it more after I've read the pdf. It's certainly cool and I like cool, new things.
Are we really having this /pointless/ conversation?
Let me re-write my initial statement so as to remove some of the ambiguity you seem to be having trouble coping with.
It is the very readiness of the people who represent, claim to represent or seek to represent the conservative-minded, non-liberal, non-progressive "right" point of view to lie to the stupid and, during the presidency of George W. Bush up to but not necessarily including the last 12 months, the reluctance of people who are representing or are seeking to represent or are claiming to represent the liberal-minded, non-conservative or "left" point of view to lie to the stupid which has lead to the supposedly "right leaning" political landscape we the public have been told we have in the USA. Reagan, for example, told comforting lies about economics. No matter how well or poorly the reader may or may not think Reagan performed as president he did what good politicians do: Tell the lie that gets the most votes. Obama isn't as good as the right has been during the duration of the presidency of George W. Bush at telling (or constructing?) the kinds of enticing lies which the stupid will believe and which will make getting elected easier and which the right has been willing to use during the duration of the presidency of George W. Bush, but Obama, moreso than others supposedly of the aforementioned left during the aforementioned time period, has never the less used the tactic of lying to people (some of whom I presume to be stupid for falling for those things he said which were lies) and has in the end gotten the same result as Reagan: he has been elected president of the United States.
Obama *may* represent an end to the left *not* employing the tactic of lying to the stupid to win elections. So far I have insufficient data to feel secure in making an assertion one way or another.
Did I spell it out in sufficient detail this time? I think my meaning was pretty clear originally, but if you insist on trying to find some kind of contradiction in what I said originally or my clarified version above I would be happy to re-clarify until the sun burns out.