The GPL already allows proprietary versions, as long as you don't distribute it. Motorola *does* in fact distribute an enhanced version of GCC, with altivec support. The patches are free (open source), but Motorola has not (or had not) signed over ownership to the FSF, so they are not included in the official version.
> Didn't they do that for some derivative of > Emacs?
Nope. The FSF has always managed to resolve the violations without going to court. Not always as fast as some of the sue-happy/.'ers wish, and usually without the violaters being humiliated. As a Dane, I actually like this aspects of the FSF. They seem to be able to find peaceful solutions to legal disputes without involving the court, and without either side losing face. However, not suing when given a chance probably constitutes anti-American behaviour.
Of course, Microsoft France will want to sell to the government. And the requirements of the law aren't anything Microsoft will have trouble fulfilling, they already license their source to selected clients. Using documented protocols for communication is more problematic, but *most* of Microsofts communication *are* using documented protocols. There are a few "extension" they will have to document, though.
Also, remember how big part of the economy the government is in Europe, and how influent France is in EU. If the France government doesn't use Microsoft products, there will be a big pressure for the private sector as well as EU to use compatible software.
The law makes a lot of sense, it is basically what any big company would require from their supliers, if they were smart enough to avoid being dependend on a single source.
There is no "list of members" at www.gnu.org. It wouldn't make sense anyway, GNU is a project, not an organization. The closest thing to being a member would be anyone who have written code used in the GNU project. That would include people like Larry Wall (and Don Knuth).
Actually, it is not GPL compatible. Nothing is except the LGPL. The only way to be GPL compatible is to neither add nor take away nor even change any GPL restrictions. Only licenses that allow relicensing qualify. This is according to RMS and it is a relatively new stance for him.
It is so new that only you have heard of it. This explains why you are unable to provide links to any public statements from RMS supporting your claim, and have to refer to anonymous letters from an non-existing organization.
Interesting to note that the commercial companies that use BSD code will most often give back.
Cool, this must be why SysVR5, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, AUX, NT, UniCOS, Ultrix, and the software used in most of the specialized routers and gateways from Cisco and others are all free.
As bellings pointed out, someone will have to pay the 4 billion dollar for the development. The license doesn't really matter much in this case, as long as the customer has the rights he needs. So while many of the usual reasons to make software free as in free speach doesn't apply, neither does many of the usual reasons not to make the software free.
With a mass market product, you can use copyright law to distribute the development cost to all the users. With a large scale system like the above, you will typically sign development contracts with the customers in advance, so you don't have to rely on copyright law to cover the development cost. Thus, you can just as well make the source free.
If you mean someone with an "@gnu.org" address, these used to be given to anyone who asked for one.
PS: The new BSD license is quite good, it is GPL compatible and has no obnoxious advertising clause. If you don't mind your code being used as part of closed software, and don't want to insist that changes to be contributed back, that's the license I'd suggest.
"Putting more of the AIX technologies into the open-source communities... will help us narrow the gap between Project Monterey [the IBM and Santa Cruz Operation IA-64 Linux project] and Linux," said Miles Barel, program director of Unix brand marketing for IBM's Enterprise Systems Group.
What happen if you restrict your math to stable democracies? (stable = the majority of the voters have lived all their life in a democracy). Is the result still as clear?
,
He's saying that there are nothing but Linux articles on this site, and I had this conversation with a friend recently who said he has stopped reading Slashdot because he has stopped learning anything about "real world" software that is used by the majority of the business world (and not as their web servers).
There are plenty of windoze oriented forums, no need to turn./ into yet another one. The focus of/. has always been Linux, free software and cool geek stuff, in that sequence. If your friend expected/. to be a news site oriented toward the business world, he is clueless.
That's not how copyright law works. Unless the software is explicitly made public domain, it has one or more owners. Everybody else have, at best, a license to the software. Only the owner can sign over ownership. If you have Emacs, you have a license (the GPL) which allows you to use and distribute Emacs under certain conditions. But you cannot sign over ownership of Emacs to Microsoft. Only the owner, the FSF, can do that.
The best way to discover how to do anti-gravity is by handing all your money over to me. At least, that is as good a way as any other.
Instead of reasearching cool gadgets that violates the basic laws of physics, reasearch the basic laws of physics, and be happy with whatever cool gadgets the new understanding of physics may make possible.
If you went back 100 years and told the leading physicists (sp?) of the day that 100 years from now, we would have the ability to photograph a human body in such a way as to be able to see the complete size and shape of objects within it in three dimensions, they would have been highly skeptical, might have even said it was impossible.
If someone 100 years ago had funded research for such a 3D device, people would have claimed he was wasting his money. And they would be correct.
It might be that true anti-gravity one day may be possible, although nothing currently indicate it, but if so it will be because of breakthrough in basic science, not because of any project with an anti-gravity gadget as its goal.
It sounds to me that Bob Park is trying to say that "wishful thinking" is not a very solid foundation for changing laws of physics.
When you fund research with particular applications in mind, these application better lay within the current laws of physics. If you are doing pure research, challenging the laws of physics, the applications are unpredictable.
we know that for a fact, because the vast majority of musicians do this today.
The minority of musicians who can live of royalty from CD sales would be affected. They would be in a good position to make money from sponsoring, live performances and merchandise, but it might not make of for the loss in royalties. I certainly don't see Michael Jackson being as rich as he is today. Being ordinarily rich instead of outrageously rich aren't that bad, though.
If you want to require the developer to give back changes to your code, yet still allow it to be used as part of proprietary programs without the technical difficulties of the LPGL, the MPL is a good alternative.
You = "the whiners in general", not you = "any particular whiner". It even includes me, since I'm whining about the whiners, and thus contributing to the off-topic noise like the rest of the whiners.
are the three worst parts of/. comments. I don't read the/. comments to see a bunch of spoiled brats whine about how *this* story was selected instead of *that* story, or how much/. sucks for being/. (a subjective view of what happens in the Linux/Open Source/Geek) instead of trying to immitate the pseudo-objectivity of traditional media.
I read the comments because the store interest me, and one can sometimes find corrections or further information or insigts about the story in the comments. I suspect this is what the same the vast majority of readers are after, and I moderate and meta-moderate with that in mind. The original comment was not only stupid and wrong, it was also absolutely off-topic.
If a story doesn't interest you, skip it. Don't misuse it for whining about how/. does not match your interests perfectly. Believe it or not, you are not the only person in the world, nor a particularily important one.
When did Sun release these as open source? They used to be open specifications, with a reference implementation source licensable "cheaply".
What part of X did Sun contribute?
MPL _does_ let anyone use the code in proprietary applications. However, the (modified) MPL'ed source files must be made publically available. It is close to the LGPL, except that the LGPL requires the program to be distributed in a format, so the user can replace the LGPL'ed part of the application. No such requirement exists with the MPL.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL already allows proprietary versions, as long as you don't distribute it. Motorola *does* in fact distribute an enhanced version of GCC, with altivec support. The patches are free (open source), but Motorola has not (or had not) signed over ownership to the FSF, so they are not included in the official version.
> Didn't they do that for some derivative of
/.'ers wish, and usually without the violaters being humiliated. As a Dane, I actually like this aspects of the FSF. They seem to be able to find peaceful solutions to legal disputes without involving the court, and without either side losing face. However, not suing when given a chance probably constitutes anti-American behaviour.
> Emacs?
Nope. The FSF has always managed to resolve the violations without going to court. Not always as fast as some of the sue-happy
... at least in the EU. While you can sign a contract that give up your right to reverse engineer a program, the contract will not be legaly binding.
Of course, Microsoft France will want to sell to the government. And the requirements of the law aren't anything Microsoft will have trouble fulfilling, they already license their source to selected clients. Using documented protocols for communication is more problematic, but *most* of Microsofts communication *are* using documented protocols. There are a few "extension" they will have to document, though.
Also, remember how big part of the economy the government is in Europe, and how influent France is in EU. If the France government doesn't use Microsoft products, there will be a big pressure for the private sector as well as EU to use compatible software.
The law makes a lot of sense, it is basically what any big company would require from their supliers, if they were smart enough to avoid being dependend on a single source.
With a mass market product, you can use copyright law to distribute the development cost to all the users. With a large scale system like the above, you will typically sign development contracts with the customers in advance, so you don't have to rely on copyright law to cover the development cost. Thus, you can just as well make the source free.
How do you become "a memeber of GNU"?
If you mean someone with an "@gnu.org" address, these used to be given to anyone who asked for one.
PS: The new BSD license is quite good, it is GPL compatible and has no obnoxious advertising clause. If you don't mind your code being used as part of closed software, and don't want to insist that changes to be contributed back, that's the license I'd suggest.
They had their own posting some time ago.
What happen if you restrict your math to stable democracies? (stable = the majority of the voters have lived all their life in a democracy). Is the result still as clear?
There are plenty of windoze oriented forums, no need to turn
I suspect Uri was being sarcastic.
That's not how copyright law works. Unless the software is explicitly made public domain, it has one or more owners. Everybody else have, at best, a license to the software. Only the owner can sign over ownership. If you have Emacs, you have a license (the GPL) which allows you to use and distribute Emacs under certain conditions. But you cannot sign over ownership of Emacs to Microsoft. Only the owner, the FSF, can do that.
Copyright law.
Isn't PostScript, the basis for NeWS and NextSTEP, vector based?
The best way to discover how to do anti-gravity is by handing all your money over to me. At least, that is as good a way as any other.
Instead of reasearching cool gadgets that violates the basic laws of physics, reasearch the basic laws of physics, and be happy with whatever cool gadgets the new understanding of physics may make possible.
It might be that true anti-gravity one day may be possible, although nothing currently indicate it, but if so it will be because of breakthrough in basic science, not because of any project with an anti-gravity gadget as its goal.
It sounds to me that Bob Park is trying to say that "wishful thinking" is not a very solid foundation for changing laws of physics.
When you fund research with particular applications in mind, these application better lay within the current laws of physics. If you are doing pure research, challenging the laws of physics, the applications are unpredictable.
we know that for a fact, because the vast majority of musicians do this today.
The minority of musicians who can live of royalty from CD sales would be affected. They would be in a good position to make money from sponsoring, live performances and merchandise, but it might not make of for the loss in royalties. I certainly don't see Michael Jackson being as rich as he is today. Being ordinarily rich instead of outrageously rich aren't that bad, though.
If you want to require the developer to give back changes to your code, yet still allow it to be used as part of proprietary programs without the technical difficulties of the LPGL, the MPL is a good alternative.
You = "the whiners in general", not you = "any particular whiner". It even includes me, since I'm whining about the whiners, and thus contributing to the off-topic noise like the rest of the whiners.
are the three worst parts of /. comments. I don't read the /. comments to see a bunch of spoiled brats whine about how *this* story was selected instead of *that* story, or how much /. sucks for being /. (a subjective view of what happens in the Linux/Open Source/Geek) instead of trying to immitate the pseudo-objectivity of traditional media.
/. does not match your interests perfectly. Believe it or not, you are not the only person in the world, nor a particularily important one.
I read the comments because the store interest me, and one can sometimes find corrections or further information or insigts about the story in the comments. I suspect this is what the same the vast majority of readers are after, and I moderate and meta-moderate with that in mind. The original comment was not only stupid and wrong, it was also absolutely off-topic.
If a story doesn't interest you, skip it. Don't misuse it for whining about how
But why should personality clashes between Theo and the NetBSD developers prevent a merge between OpenBSD and FreeBSD?
Of course, the different focus on OpenBSD and FreeBSD might be enough to prevent a merge.
When did Sun release these as open source? They used to be open specifications, with a reference implementation source licensable "cheaply".
What part of X did Sun contribute?
MPL _does_ let anyone use the code in proprietary applications. However, the (modified) MPL'ed source files must be made publically available. It is close to the LGPL, except that the LGPL requires the program to be distributed in a format, so the user can replace the LGPL'ed part of the application. No such requirement exists with the MPL.