It is not the FSF, but the Open Source Initiative who maintains the list. The OSI people are largely the same who invented the term "Open Source" for free (as in speech) software.
The FSF doesn't like the term "open source", they prefer "free software".
I agree, they *invented* the term "Open Source" to get a less ambigious (and less politically ladden) term for what FSF called "Free Software". When the term started to get diluted, it lost much of its usefullness.
Allthough I like the political implications of the term "Free Software", I miss being able to say Open Source(TM) when I want to be totally unambigious.
Actually, Sun has been pretty honest about SCSL *not* being an Open Source compliant license. They/have/ claimed that it had "most of the benefits" from Open Source, which of course can be argued.
Beside that, I agree that Sun doesn't owe us (the free software community) anything, and also that the previous poster is totally missing the point when he thinks this somehow is a reason *not* to celebrate when Sun desides to contribute to the community.
Excerpts. What if a print magazine is doing an article on Widgets, and wants to quote two paragraphs from the GDL'd Widgets Manual. Is it possible? Does the Magazine have to GDL itself? GDL that article? Since the magazine has a circulation of >100 does that have an impact?
The magazine would not need special permission, as the quote would be "fair use" under copyright law. The situation is -- seen from the viewpoint of the Magazine -- identical to books under an ordinary proprietary license. No permission is needed to quote short, relevant pieces from these either.
Private use. Some guy wants to take a whole GDL document, modify it with his comments and give it to the 115 people in his lecture class. Does he also have to give them floppies since the distribution is > 100?
Making 115 copies are unblikely to be considered fair use, so he would have to make the modified book available to the student in electronic form.
Inclusions. Some guy is writing a GDL'd document and wants to include a longish section of a non-GDL'd document. Is this illegal, as it would be with code under GPL? Suppose I want to quote a large chunk of text that is genuinely public domain. Does the license now infect that text in other places?
It will not affect the text in other places (like the GPL doesn't infect code in other places). That is copyright law again.
Including public domain text should be safe, but I'm not sure about other licenses. It would be ironic if you could not include GPL'ed code (beyond fair use) in a GDL'ed manual.
It would be nice with some information on their long-term plans. They want to merge the code bases, presumably under the free BSD license, but some parts of BSD/OS are owned by other people and will necessarily remain proprietary.
Are they going for a Netscape/Mozilla like situation, where we have a free Mozilla/FreeBSD and a branded proprietary Netscape/BSD/OS derived from the free code base?
The GNU C library is used on Linux and Hurd, and earlier versions also worked on SunOS. This was useful back when Sun didn't have an ANSI compliant C library.
It implements many standards, apart from ANSI/ISO C also various Posix and Open Group standards.
It will never be completely debugged, since both the standards and the underlying OS'es keep changing.
It is written in GNU C.
It's effect on performance depends on what you do. It can range from "none" to the only significant factor, depending on how much your application uses library functions.
You might consider picking up the small, free Cygnus C library as a foundation. It is intended for embedded use, and is also the foundation for the Cygwin Unix emulation for win32. Thus, it should be both light weight and relatively complete.
I'm a programmer, I sit in front of a computer screen all day. I get the news I can't get otherwise (like/.) from the net, but for generic news a newspaper, which doesn't involve sitting in front of a screen, is much better.
Until we get _much_ better digital paper, I don't want to give up my newspaper.
Many companies (especially banks) have given free PC's to all their employees the last couple of years. The idea is
1) To give them something they don't have to pay tax off. 2) A vague hope that they will be better at using computers (which is why the Danish politicians doesn't tax these gifts, liuke they tax everything else).
I don't think there are anything signficant about it, like the US (and unlike the rest of EU) Denmark has had a booming economy and low unemployment the last few years. In such a situation, companies will do their best to make themselves an attractive place to work. Tax-free gifts are one way, especially since the strong unions prevents raising the pay.
Does there exist a good, non-judgmental (I should be so lucky) article about what really happened, focussing on the operational differences between emacs & Xemacs?
There can't, since the people with first hand knowledge have widely diverging stories. Read them yourself, and form your own opinion, instead of getting them predigested from someone else.
Actually, I was thinking about the Borland C/C++ compiler only, which is what is most clearly equivalent to GCC. I use both Borland C++ 5.0 and the GCC from Cygwin 1.0, and GCC generates 10% faster code. GNU ld, on the other hand, uses way to much memory (1 Gb for my project), and the debug information takes ridiculous amount of space. Linking is also a weak point for Borland C++.
Delphi is very different, GCC doesn't include a Pascal compiler yet, and as you say, the Delphi compiler is much faster. I agree dropping it for an alpha version of GNU Pascal would be ridiculous.
Precompiled header support was developed by Cygnus, but apparently there was issues with the implementation, so it was never merged into gcc. Cygnus has now (sub-)contracted the job to a new person, who apparently work directly with the public gcc tree, rather than the internal Cygnus sources.
Corel is attempting to create a new market for non-technical Linux users for their office application with their distribution. This is a totally different market than the Borland development tools are attracting. Thus, I don't think tying the development tools to their distribution would make any economic sense.
Corel has until now been a user and (indirectly, through Cygnus contracts) a developer of GCC. They have paid Cygnus to implement various MS extensions for GCC, as well as support for precompiled headers. I hope this move does not mean they will use (and enhance) the proprietary Borland compilers instead.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
Once a developer or team advances their program sufficiently for other projects (with similar needs) to notice how cool it is, these other lesser projects tend to be abandoned into obscurity.
True, but if the developer ressources are spread out too thin, none of the projects may reach maturity, or it may take an ridiculous amount of time. It took 10 years before we got the current situation with two dominating free widget sets for X11. In the computer business, ten years are close to "never".
This is why I think we should encourage young programmers interested in free software to think really hard before staring a new project. Aren't there some existing, related project they can contribute to instead?
We don't see a lot of new widget sets coming out anymore.
Actually, we do, but most of them are build "on top" op Gtk+. For example, there are currently four different C++ toolkits build on top of Gtk. True, they fill different niches, but each of the teams consist of just one or two core developers.
Your argument is heard often, which is really scary, because it is based on the false premise of infinite developer ressources.
Think about the situation before Qt/KDE and Gtk/Gnome, where we had a dozen different GUI toolkits, all of which sucked badly, and none of which had a momentum significantly larger than the other. An application writer would have to choose one of them, and send fixes and enhancement to one that alone, helping perhaps 5% of the other application writers in the process. Today, he can one of the two main toolkits/environments, and his fixes and enhancements will help maybe 45% of the other application writers.
Of course, some choices can be justified because they provide compatibility, for example LessTif, GnuSTEP and winelib, and there should always be room for research-like projects. What is needed is one or two choices that are clearly "mainstream", and thus can be used for focusing developer energy.
For journaling file systems, the situation isn't all bad. XFS, JFS and Ext3 are all clearly needed in order to support interoperability with SGI, IBM and Ext2 systems. And ReiserFS has some very interesting application for file system based databases, which I'm really hoping will turn out good.
I read The Martian Chronicles when I was 12, didn't understand a thing, and avoided him for years. Lately, I just "fall over" _The Illustrated Man_ and some other Ray Bradbury collection, and loved them. Similarily, I read _Ubiq_ when I was young, and my impression was that it was "too weird". Back then I much prefered the straight-forward stories of Asimov, Clarke or Niven. My guess is that most people will need to age before they can read and appreciate the multiple layers of Bradbury or Dick's work.
Dan Simmons, on the other hand, is very straight forward in comparison. He might be some weird universes he builds, but they still make sense in a more obvious way. Or maybe it is just because I did read _Hyperion_ as an adult.
The first volume contains 6 loosely connected stories, which give a good, broad introduction to the genre. They are all connected in the second volume (_Fall of Hyperion_).
Just a single warning, Dan Simmon is primarily a horror-writer, and some of the stories in _Hyperion_ are very creepy (others are just as touching).
Actually, the TCO of ownership is a point *for* free software, in this context. If only 20% of the TCO is buying the software, it means that there still is the remaining 80% to extract from the customer, so giving away the software as a "loss leader" may make perfectly good sense.
I loved HOMM1 but for some reason got bored with HOMM2, and the screenshoots of HOMM3 looks identical to HOMM2. What is new in HOMM3 compared to HOMM2?
Slashdot Mirror
It is not the FSF, but the Open Source Initiative who maintains the list. The OSI people are largely the same who invented the term "Open Source" for free (as in speech) software.
The FSF doesn't like the term "open source", they prefer "free software".
I agree, they *invented* the term "Open Source" to get a less ambigious (and less politically ladden) term for what FSF called "Free Software". When the term started to get diluted, it lost much of its usefullness.
Allthough I like the political implications of the term "Free Software", I miss being able to say Open Source(TM) when I want to be totally unambigious.
Actually, Sun has been pretty honest about SCSL *not* being an Open Source compliant license. They /have/ claimed that it had "most of the benefits" from Open Source, which of course can be argued.
Beside that, I agree that Sun doesn't owe us (the free software community) anything, and also that the previous poster is totally missing the point when he thinks this somehow is a reason *not* to celebrate when Sun desides to contribute to the community.
Including public domain text should be safe, but I'm not sure about other licenses. It would be ironic if you could not include GPL'ed code (beyond fair use) in a GDL'ed manual.
It would be nice with some information on their long-term plans. They want to merge the code bases, presumably under the free BSD license, but some parts of BSD/OS are owned by other people and will necessarily remain proprietary.
Are they going for a Netscape/Mozilla like situation, where we have a free Mozilla/FreeBSD and a branded proprietary Netscape/BSD/OS derived from the free code base?
The GNU C library is used on Linux and Hurd, and earlier versions also worked on SunOS. This was useful back when Sun didn't have an ANSI compliant C library.
It implements many standards, apart from ANSI/ISO C also various Posix and Open Group standards.
It will never be completely debugged, since both the standards and the underlying OS'es keep changing.
It is written in GNU C.
It's effect on performance depends on what you do. It can range from "none" to the only significant factor, depending on how much your application uses library functions.
You might consider picking up the small, free Cygnus C library as a foundation. It is intended for embedded use, and is also the foundation for the Cygwin Unix emulation for win32. Thus, it should be both light weight and relatively complete.
I don't believe a game-mod counts as a _high-profile_ violation. It is a violation, but in the world of suits a rather low profile one.
I'm a programmer, I sit in front of a computer screen all day. I get the news I can't get otherwise (like /.) from the net, but for generic news a newspaper, which doesn't involve sitting in front of a screen, is much better.
Until we get _much_ better digital paper, I don't want to give up my newspaper.
Many companies (especially banks) have given free PC's to all their employees the last couple of years. The idea is
1) To give them something they don't have to pay tax off.
2) A vague hope that they will be better at using computers (which is why the Danish politicians doesn't tax these gifts, liuke they tax everything else).
I don't think there are anything signficant about it, like the US (and unlike the rest of EU) Denmark has had a booming economy and low unemployment the last few years. In such a situation, companies will do their best to make themselves an attractive place to work. Tax-free gifts are one way, especially since the strong unions prevents raising the pay.
lcc doesn't have as many backends or frontends as gcc, but it should be a nice little C compiler.
Actually, I was thinking about the Borland C/C++ compiler only, which is what is most clearly equivalent to GCC. I use both Borland C++ 5.0 and the GCC from Cygwin 1.0, and GCC generates 10% faster code. GNU ld, on the other hand, uses way to much memory (1 Gb for my project), and the debug information takes ridiculous amount of space. Linking is also a weak point for Borland C++.
Delphi is very different, GCC doesn't include a Pascal compiler yet, and as you say, the Delphi compiler is much faster. I agree dropping it for an alpha version of GNU Pascal would be ridiculous.
Precompiled header support was developed by Cygnus, but apparently there was issues with the implementation, so it was never merged into gcc. Cygnus has now (sub-)contracted the job to a new person, who apparently work directly with the public gcc tree, rather than the internal Cygnus sources.
Or something like that.
Delphi is very popular around here, judging from traffic in the dk.* newsgroups, it is discussed as much as C/C++ and Visual Basic.
What does (n/t) stand for?
Corel is attempting to create a new market for non-technical Linux users for their office application with their distribution. This is a totally different market than the Borland development tools are attracting. Thus, I don't think tying the development tools to their distribution would make any economic sense.
Corel has until now been a user and (indirectly, through Cygnus contracts) a developer of GCC. They have paid Cygnus to implement various MS extensions for GCC, as well as support for precompiled headers. I hope this move does not mean they will use (and enhance) the proprietary Borland compilers instead.
Hmm... Given the existence of GCC, maybe they will open source or drop the compiler, and sell the IDE only instead.
I loved B1FF!
Regarding the current noise, I'm just waiting for september to end, then everything will be better. September has just felt so long, this year.
This is why I think we should encourage young programmers interested in free software to think really hard before staring a new project. Aren't there some existing, related project they can contribute to instead?
Actually, we do, but most of them are build "on top" op Gtk+. For example, there are currently four different C++ toolkits build on top of Gtk. True, they fill different niches, but each of the teams consist of just one or two core developers.Your argument is heard often, which is really scary, because it is based on the false premise of infinite developer ressources.
Think about the situation before Qt/KDE and Gtk/Gnome, where we had a dozen different GUI toolkits, all of which sucked badly, and none of which had a momentum significantly larger than the other. An application writer would have to choose one of them, and send fixes and enhancement to one that alone, helping perhaps 5% of the other application writers in the process. Today, he can one of the two main toolkits/environments, and his fixes and enhancements will help maybe 45% of the other application writers.
Of course, some choices can be justified because they provide compatibility, for example LessTif, GnuSTEP and winelib, and there should always be room for research-like projects. What is needed is one or two choices that are clearly "mainstream", and thus can be used for focusing developer energy.
For journaling file systems, the situation isn't all bad. XFS, JFS and Ext3 are all clearly needed in order to support interoperability with SGI, IBM and Ext2 systems. And ReiserFS has some very interesting application for file system based databases, which I'm really hoping will turn out good.
I read The Martian Chronicles when I was 12, didn't understand a thing, and avoided him for years. Lately, I just "fall over" _The Illustrated Man_ and some other Ray Bradbury collection, and loved them. Similarily, I read _Ubiq_ when I was young, and my impression was that it was "too weird". Back then I much prefered the straight-forward stories of Asimov, Clarke or Niven. My guess is that most people will need to age before they can read and appreciate the multiple layers of Bradbury or Dick's work.
Dan Simmons, on the other hand, is very straight forward in comparison. He might be some weird universes he builds, but they still make sense in a more obvious way. Or maybe it is just because I did read _Hyperion_ as an adult.
The first volume contains 6 loosely connected stories, which give a good, broad introduction to the genre. They are all connected in the second volume (_Fall of Hyperion_).
Just a single warning, Dan Simmon is primarily a horror-writer, and some of the stories in _Hyperion_ are very creepy (others are just as touching).
Actually, the TCO of ownership is a point *for* free software, in this context. If only 20% of the TCO is buying the software, it means that there still is the remaining 80% to extract from the customer, so giving away the software as a "loss leader" may make perfectly good sense.
I like your scale ;-)
I loved HOMM1 but for some reason got bored with HOMM2, and the screenshoots of HOMM3 looks identical to HOMM2. What is new in HOMM3 compared to HOMM2?