I'd suggest using the new BSD license instead, slightly more legalize, but unfortunately necessary to give you some protection in the case of a lawsuit.
as copyright law is today, you *have* to explictly give a license in order to allow other to copy your work. Without copyright law, this would not be necessary.
> The Free Software Foundation will only accept
> one license
BZZT! WRONG!
Please follow the link given in the article. The FSF has evaluated a lot of licenses, and some (like BSDL and MPL) get the "free software license" predicate, other (like the Sun "community license" or the Apple license does not).
What is true is that they in generel prefer the GPL, not really surprising given that they wrote it, but they also use and accept other free software licenses in situations where they are more practical.
The myth that the FSF rejects all other licenses is spread both by people who are ignorant and anti-GPL zeleats who deliberately lies. The second group cannot not be stopped by arguments, but the first group can easily find out the FSF position by looking at the content of their ftp site, and the statements on their web site.
What you describe sounds very much like "flood science", a very entertaining field to study. Is "scientific creationism" just another name for "flood science".
The only form of creationism I know involves an omnipotent creator. Such a creater can obviously do anything (that's omnipotent for you), including faking evidence of evolution. However, any theory requiring an omnipotent creator is unscientific, as it can never be disproved. One requirement for a scientific theory is that is falsifable, i.e. it is possible to design an experiment with a possible outcome that would disprove the theory.
Which makes me wonder, what is this "scientific creationism" thing? Creationism without an creator? Or just another abuse o fthe word scientific?
Note that "scientific" does not mean "true". A theory can be scientific and false, or unscientific and true.
RMS and ESR accomplishments.
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ESR On XML-RPC
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· Score: 2
> Like RMS he seems to have become famous whilst
> only having produced a single piece of well-
> known code
RMS is the initial author of gdb, gcc and emacs, all three of which are major programs.
ESR hasn't done any major projects (fetchmail is small), but have contributed to zillions of projects, like Netscape and Emacs.
Both, of course, have done a lot of non-programming work related to free/open software.
Feel free to disagree with them, or dislike their style. There is plenty to disagree with and to dislike. But both have earned respect by their accomplishments.
Commercial companies steal a lot of proprietary code from each other, and obviously also from free software regardless of any licenses. The BSD license is probably the most violated software license in the world.
In order for a violation to come to court, two criteria have to be fullfiled.
1. It has to be discovered by the copyright holder. This rarely happens.
2. The copyright holder has to care enough to bring the issue to court.
This happens even more rarely, commercial entities would only care enough if the other company was a direct competitor, or the code itself was a product. And the Regents of UC, who have plenty of money, have only once sued for a BSDL violation, and that was a counter-suit.
In the hypothetical example[1] made by the AC, there was no indication of whether the copyright holders was aware of the violation, or if they cared. Cormack had no legal interest in the issue, as his code was licensed.
[1] We should always treat allegations froms AC's as hypothetical.
> How can you know that you will approve of a
> license you haven't even read?
Well, trust in one way. Even without that, there are severe limits to what the FSF can change. They have a lot of code under v 2.0, and written contractual obligations to a lot of contributers about what licenses they can release their code under.
> Thus, it's quite likely that even were MS
> guilty, not much anyone would hear of it at all.
Despite the fact that most people know Microsoft has been judged guilty in abusing their monopoly power, and despite the fact that the premises for the judgement is publically available and written in plain english most people believe Microsoft is unfairly procecuted.
I doesn't matter what the truth is, it doesn't matter if the evidence is available for all to see, good spin doctors can make people not want to see the evidence.
It is worth noting that the GPL does not prevent Microsoft from using, improving or distributing the code. The GPL gives exactly the same right to Microsoft, as it gives to "the little guy".
The only thing that can prevent Microsoft from using GPL'ed code, is Microsoft itself. The restrictions imposed by the GPL, which are the same for Microsoft as for everyone else, may conflict with their business model.
Why? Because the art of film is not the drama. Take away the auteurist director, the interesting camera work, and the other "trappings" they are hoping to avoid, and you are left with a stage play, shot on location with a souped-up camcorder. No thanks!
I totally agree with your reasoning, but I have one little problem with the conclusion... I avoided the first Dogme films when they were shown in the cinema, but _The Celebration_ ("Festen") was one of the most popular movies here in Denmark, and everybody seemed to agree about how good it was. So when it came on TV a couple of years later, I watched it, and it actually _was_ both funny and engaging. The same was true for "Mifunes sidste sang" (direct translation of title: _Last song of Mifune_), and I recently watched "Italiensk for begyndere" (dir.trans.: _Italian for beginners_) in the theatre, another good movie.
So I have been forced to come to the conclusion, that maybe good acting and a good story _can_ carry a good movie.
However, I suspect not alone. The directers behind all three movies are both technically brialliant and experienced people, so are the camera men and other support staff. I suspect it makes a huge difference whether the man holding the "souped-up camcorder" and the man directing him are experienced professionals who _know_ how a scene must look on screen to look good, or not.
Apparently, Dogme 95 has become popular outside Denmark by young directors with limited budgets, who think the rules may be a short-cut to success. And apparently, they have all been failures. So I suspect Dogme 95 only works for experienced directors, who need them to get a chance working with the basics again. Young directors should use any technical trick in the book to make their stuff work.
You are missing the point about the dogma 2001 manfest. The point _isn't_ that a good game designer can't create a game that break any or all the rules. Of course, a good game designer can use any of the elements in a game.
However, a good game designer does not _need_ any of these elements in order to create a good game. So a good game designer should be able to tro create a good game that follows all these rules.
The idea with Dogme 95 wasn't that all films should follow these rules either. It is meant as a challenge, an experienced directer can use Dogme 95 to see if he still can make original films, without techincal bandaids or worn-out cliches. The latest film from Lars von Trier, the biggest name behind Dogme 95, is _Dancer in the Dark_ with the singer Bjork. It was an expensive and technically challenging film after European scale, and wasn't even close to being Dogme 95 certified.
Really. Genetic engineering is where all the fun is. Clones are just genetically identical to whomever they were clones from, they will still differ because of environment, but there is no chance of improvements because of genetic variations.
A few rich "eccetric" people will make clone of themselves, some will use it as a cure for childlessness, maybe it will become popular among some single women and lesbians, but even here most will prefer the variation and reletive "naturalness" offered by artificial insemnination.
It is just up in the press because it is a new technology, and people fear anything new. In practice, it will probably have even less effect on society as a whole than e.g. heart transplants, which also was feared when the possibility was first introduced.
...or rather, it is only relevant for C++ libraries, the C ABI has been stable for a long time.
So has the glibc ABI actually, except that it is not 100% bug compatible. I.e., applications that relies on bugs in the library in order to work, may break when new the library is updated.
You may be right as long as consumer software is defined as big, monolithic chunks. As soon as it can be split up into isolated parts, open source solutions can compete. Take OS'es. IBM's OS/360 took a thousand mand year to design an implement. No feasible open source business plan can compete with that. Unix, however, was much smaller and divided into simple components. The GNU project could replace these, one by one.
Monolithic software solutions are intrincicly both errorphrone and difficult to change, a become more so with time. Manpower can compensate for this, but in the long run non-monolithic designs will win in the marked, creating an opening for free software.
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what > the focus groups want and then enforce it
Free software follow the market much more closely than proprietary software, in fact because there is no owner who can force it to follow some arbitrary business plan. The market, however, is not defined by "focus groups". More about that later.
> no money - you can't afford to compete if you
> don't have enough money to do so
No money means free, a price that is hard to beat.
> a mistaken belief as to the ability of users.
> Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of
> computing, which states that everyone knows how
> to program
Not entirely correct. The market for free software consists of two groups, people who can program, and people who can affort to hire programmers. This means that ordinary consumers are never the primary market, but they can be an indirect market if they work for companies or organizations who can hire programmers.
> - false; modern programs are exceptionally
> complicated and most users are not programmers.
Maybe consumer programs shouldn't be that complicated.
> no innovation. Because there's no money for
> r+d, there's little innovation and open source
> plays catchup all the time.
I follow the GCC list, they typically implements new optimizations that have been described in academic papers. This means that the universities work as a "R&D" department for GCC for more theoretical work.
In the less theoretical area, there is a huge mass of small free software projects that implements crazy ideas, most of these are just stupid and will die out, but a few will have good ideas that will eventualy be incorporated in the more high profile projects.
> Furthermore, there's no incentive for
> improvement - open source doesn't have to make
> improvements like MS does
Improvements will tend to be centered around the consumers existing work situation, many consumers will like that.
Please remember that desktop != small devices, for example "plug and play" is not relevant to small devices, which typically have very limited expansion capabilities, if any.
Most of the industry money are in servers and small devices, however, most of the users are desktop users, in particular the fraction of the users who care about the OS (few people care about what OS their toaster or laundry machine run).
part of the industry that is, i.e. the part of the industry creating large servers, not the part of the industry creating small special purpose devices. Even IBM and Compaq have interests in both sides.
It is always a judgement call whether splitting the development in two is preferable from having a single three with some compile times options.
In any case, I think the improvenemts in 2.4 and 2.4.1 are more server oriented, than small device oriented.
One should remember the industry track record for creating consortia for developing and promoting Unix. These have been dominated by backstabbing among the members, and demands of holding back technology that competed with the members proprietary solutions.
I suspect some of the players (IBM, SGI) actually remember this period, and are happy to have a independent benevolant dictator running Linux, instead of a consortium.
Re:It is *not opt-out, it is opt-in.
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
> they can find them all on a government provided
> list!
I don't think the Norwegian government provides such a service, I suspect anyone can set one up. Someone else refered to the Norwegian phone company.
No, there are however a certain health risk telling blond jokes in a country where 90% of the population are blondes.
Yes, and the real solution is deregulation...
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
Remove the law that forbid you from shooting spammers.
Re:while (opt-out && only email) cry ();
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
#1, it is opt-in, not opt-out (despite what the submission text says).
#2, what is the problem? Political spammers are just as bad as any other kind of spammer, and deserve to be shoot.
In any case, enforcement is unlikely to be an issue. Only Norwegain spammers are really covered by the law, and the main effect of the law will be that a nice letter will make them stop, without the need to involve law enforcement.
#3, please reserve your paranoia for US politicians, and in any case, who cares about their motives as long as the do the right thing (as in this case).
BTW, in Denmark we already *have* an opt-out system for unadressed junk snailmail, it has worked well for years. We also recently god an opt-out system for direct snailmail, and I haven't received any since I opt'ed out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest using the new BSD license instead, slightly more legalize, but unfortunately necessary to give you some protection in the case of a lawsuit.
as copyright law is today, you *have* to explictly give a license in order to allow other to copy your work. Without copyright law, this would not be necessary.
RMS views the GPL as a step in that direction.
> The Free Software Foundation will only accept
> one license
BZZT! WRONG!
Please follow the link given in the article. The FSF has evaluated a lot of licenses, and some (like BSDL and MPL) get the "free software license" predicate, other (like the Sun "community license" or the Apple license does not).
What is true is that they in generel prefer the GPL, not really surprising given that they wrote it, but they also use and accept other free software licenses in situations where they are more practical.
The myth that the FSF rejects all other licenses is spread both by people who are ignorant and anti-GPL zeleats who deliberately lies. The second group cannot not be stopped by arguments, but the first group can easily find out the FSF position by looking at the content of their ftp site, and the statements on their web site.
What you describe sounds very much like "flood science", a very entertaining field to study. Is "scientific creationism" just another name for "flood science".
The only form of creationism I know involves an omnipotent creator. Such a creater can obviously do anything (that's omnipotent for you), including faking evidence of evolution. However, any theory requiring an omnipotent creator is unscientific, as it can never be disproved. One requirement for a scientific theory is that is falsifable, i.e. it is possible to design an experiment with a possible outcome that would disprove the theory.
Which makes me wonder, what is this "scientific creationism" thing? Creationism without an creator? Or just another abuse o fthe word scientific?
Note that "scientific" does not mean "true". A theory can be scientific and false, or unscientific and true.
> Like RMS he seems to have become famous whilst
> only having produced a single piece of well-
> known code
RMS is the initial author of gdb, gcc and emacs, all three of which are major programs.
ESR hasn't done any major projects (fetchmail is small), but have contributed to zillions of projects, like Netscape and Emacs.
Both, of course, have done a lot of non-programming work related to free/open software.
Feel free to disagree with them, or dislike their style. There is plenty to disagree with and to dislike. But both have earned respect by their accomplishments.
Commercial companies steal a lot of proprietary code from each other, and obviously also from free software regardless of any licenses. The BSD license is probably the most violated software license in the world.
In order for a violation to come to court, two criteria have to be fullfiled.
1. It has to be discovered by the copyright holder. This rarely happens.
2. The copyright holder has to care enough to bring the issue to court.
This happens even more rarely, commercial entities would only care enough if the other company was a direct competitor, or the code itself was a product. And the Regents of UC, who have plenty of money, have only once sued for a BSDL violation, and that was a counter-suit.
In the hypothetical example[1] made by the AC, there was no indication of whether the copyright holders was aware of the violation, or if they cared. Cormack had no legal interest in the issue, as his code was licensed.
[1] We should always treat allegations froms AC's as hypothetical.
> How can you know that you will approve of a
> license you haven't even read?
Well, trust in one way. Even without that, there are severe limits to what the FSF can change. They have a lot of code under v 2.0, and written contractual obligations to a lot of contributers about what licenses they can release their code under.
> Thus, it's quite likely that even were MS
> guilty, not much anyone would hear of it at all.
Despite the fact that most people know Microsoft has been judged guilty in abusing their monopoly power, and despite the fact that the premises for the judgement is publically available and written in plain english most people believe Microsoft is unfairly procecuted.
I doesn't matter what the truth is, it doesn't matter if the evidence is available for all to see, good spin doctors can make people not want to see the evidence.
It is worth noting that the GPL does not prevent Microsoft from using, improving or distributing the code. The GPL gives exactly the same right to Microsoft, as it gives to "the little guy".
The only thing that can prevent Microsoft from using GPL'ed code, is Microsoft itself. The restrictions imposed by the GPL, which are the same for Microsoft as for everyone else, may conflict with their business model.
> "Enterprise-ready" is an E10k with 64 CPUs,
> 64GB of RAM, a and multi-terabyte SAN.
I suspect this is not the definition used by SCO when describing the advantages of UnixWare.
In any case, IBM can deliver Linux based solutions with that kind of power, and better support.
So I have been forced to come to the conclusion, that maybe good acting and a good story _can_ carry a good movie.
However, I suspect not alone. The directers behind all three movies are both technically brialliant and experienced people, so are the camera men and other support staff. I suspect it makes a huge difference whether the man holding the "souped-up camcorder" and the man directing him are experienced professionals who _know_ how a scene must look on screen to look good, or not.
Apparently, Dogme 95 has become popular outside Denmark by young directors with limited budgets, who think the rules may be a short-cut to success. And apparently, they have all been failures. So I suspect Dogme 95 only works for experienced directors, who need them to get a chance working with the basics again. Young directors should use any technical trick in the book to make their stuff work.
Maybe something similar is true for games.
You are missing the point about the dogma 2001 manfest. The point _isn't_ that a good game designer can't create a game that break any or all the rules. Of course, a good game designer can use any of the elements in a game.
However, a good game designer does not _need_ any of these elements in order to create a good game. So a good game designer should be able to tro create a good game that follows all these rules.
The idea with Dogme 95 wasn't that all films should follow these rules either. It is meant as a challenge, an experienced directer can use Dogme 95 to see if he still can make original films, without techincal bandaids or worn-out cliches. The latest film from Lars von Trier, the biggest name behind Dogme 95, is _Dancer in the Dark_ with the singer Bjork. It was an expensive and technically challenging film after European scale, and wasn't even close to being Dogme 95 certified.
Really. Genetic engineering is where all the fun is. Clones are just genetically identical to whomever they were clones from, they will still differ because of environment, but there is no chance of improvements because of genetic variations.
A few rich "eccetric" people will make clone of themselves, some will use it as a cure for childlessness, maybe it will become popular among some single women and lesbians, but even here most will prefer the variation and reletive "naturalness" offered by artificial insemnination.
It is just up in the press because it is a new technology, and people fear anything new. In practice, it will probably have even less effect on society as a whole than e.g. heart transplants, which also was feared when the possibility was first introduced.
[1] We already clone fertilized eggs from humans.
...or rather, it is only relevant for C++ libraries, the C ABI has been stable for a long time.
So has the glibc ABI actually, except that it is not 100% bug compatible. I.e., applications that relies on bugs in the library in order to work, may break when new the library is updated.
Well, a lot of milk and some cacao. Mostly it is a matter of taste what you prefer.
> open source isn't viable for consumer software.
You may be right as long as consumer software is defined as big, monolithic chunks. As soon as it can be split up into isolated parts, open source solutions can compete. Take OS'es. IBM's OS/360 took a thousand mand year to design an implement. No feasible open source business plan can compete with that. Unix, however, was much smaller and divided into simple components. The GNU project could replace these, one by one.
Monolithic software solutions are intrincicly both errorphrone and difficult to change, a become more so with time. Manpower can compensate for this, but in the long run non-monolithic designs will win in the marked, creating an opening for free software.
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what > the focus groups want and then enforce it
Free software follow the market much more closely than proprietary software, in fact because there is no owner who can force it to follow some arbitrary business plan. The market, however, is not defined by "focus groups". More about that later.
> no money - you can't afford to compete if you
> don't have enough money to do so
No money means free, a price that is hard to beat.
> a mistaken belief as to the ability of users.
> Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of
> computing, which states that everyone knows how
> to program
Not entirely correct. The market for free software consists of two groups, people who can program, and people who can affort to hire programmers. This means that ordinary consumers are never the primary market, but they can be an indirect market if they work for companies or organizations who can hire programmers.
> - false; modern programs are exceptionally
> complicated and most users are not programmers.
Maybe consumer programs shouldn't be that complicated.
> no innovation. Because there's no money for
> r+d, there's little innovation and open source
> plays catchup all the time.
I follow the GCC list, they typically implements new optimizations that have been described in academic papers. This means that the universities work as a "R&D" department for GCC for more theoretical work.
In the less theoretical area, there is a huge mass of small free software projects that implements crazy ideas, most of these are just stupid and will die out, but a few will have good ideas that will eventualy be incorporated in the more high profile projects.
> Furthermore, there's no incentive for
> improvement - open source doesn't have to make
> improvements like MS does
Improvements will tend to be centered around the consumers existing work situation, many consumers will like that.
Please remember that desktop != small devices, for example "plug and play" is not relevant to small devices, which typically have very limited expansion capabilities, if any.
Most of the industry money are in servers and small devices, however, most of the users are desktop users, in particular the fraction of the users who care about the OS (few people care about what OS their toaster or laundry machine run).
I suspect Linus already put in more work on Linux, than what one can expect from even a good full-time engineer.
> ...and the industry really wants the reverse,
part of the industry that is, i.e. the part of the industry creating large servers, not the part of the industry creating small special purpose devices. Even IBM and Compaq have interests in both sides.
It is always a judgement call whether splitting the development in two is preferable from having a single three with some compile times options.
In any case, I think the improvenemts in 2.4 and 2.4.1 are more server oriented, than small device oriented.
One should remember the industry track record for creating consortia for developing and promoting Unix. These have been dominated by backstabbing among the members, and demands of holding back technology that competed with the members proprietary solutions.
I suspect some of the players (IBM, SGI) actually remember this period, and are happy to have a independent benevolant dictator running Linux, instead of a consortium.
> they can find them all on a government provided
> list!
I don't think the Norwegian government provides such a service, I suspect anyone can set one up. Someone else refered to the Norwegian phone company.
No, there are however a certain health risk telling blond jokes in a country where 90% of the population are blondes.
Remove the law that forbid you from shooting spammers.
#1, it is opt-in, not opt-out (despite what the submission text says).
#2, what is the problem? Political spammers are just as bad as any other kind of spammer, and deserve to be shoot.
In any case, enforcement is unlikely to be an issue. Only Norwegain spammers are really covered by the law, and the main effect of the law will be that a nice letter will make them stop, without the need to involve law enforcement.
#3, please reserve your paranoia for US politicians, and in any case, who cares about their motives as long as the do the right thing (as in this case).
BTW, in Denmark we already *have* an opt-out system for unadressed junk snailmail, it has worked well for years. We also recently god an opt-out system for direct snailmail, and I haven't received any since I opt'ed out.