Perhaps the people that care about non-systemd does not contribute well enough to UPower? I'm not familiar with the UPower project, but in general if people want something to happen the best thing to do is usually to pick up the task and just do it.
The decision to drop stderr has made my life hell. I wish systemd guys understood how important it is to those of us that run servers.
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but there has not been any "decision to drop stderr". It's clearly possible to set where it should go:
StandardError=
Controls where file descriptor 2 (STDERR) of the executed processes is connected to. The available options are identical to those of StandardOutput=, with one exception: if set to inherit the file descriptor used for standard output is duplicated for standard error. This setting defaults to the value set with DefaultStandardError= in systemd-system.conf(5), which defaults to inherit.
If it's GNU dd you might want to add the oflag=direct option. Otherwise writes will just buffer up in memory before Linux decides to actually write them to disk.
That there's no point in talking about "how Unix works" since Unix has never been consistent unless you're talking about some of the really old AT&T releases. Once there were multiple Unix vendors things started changing all the time. What we're seeing now in the Linux space is no different from what has always been the case.
Unix is an evolving class of operating systems and they work the way we make them work. Sometimes we come up with new ideas that may or may not improve it. Almost no one agrees that Unix of the 90s was at perfection and that nothing would ever have to be changed again.
That's correct. My point was not that it was easy for all programs, just that the original statement that using the GPL makes it hard to even use the library as part of another program simply isn't true at all. It would assume that no program is licensed under GPL, and that certainly isn't the case.
In that case then that will provide good feedback for GPLv4. That's why the "or later" clause is needed, so that the license can be upgraded when bugs in the old license is found.
If you pass on that binary to someone else then you will have to offer him or her the source code to the full application. If you never distribute the binary then you don't have to release anything.
Users that lack the ability to change the software themselves can of course ask someone else to do it for them, either for free or for compensation. This is not at all the case with proprietary software. The vendor may of course choose to change the software for you but you have no such guarantees. Microsoft is not going to make fundamental changes to Windows or most of their other products if you ask them. With free software you are not locked in to the original vendor, you can ask anyone else to do changes for you.
It's too simplistic to think of users and developers as separate entities and to say that the GPL is anti any of those is just ridiculous. Even users without a desire to write programs can have an interest in the source code. Even though they may not have the required skill and knowledge to modify the software themselves they may contract that job to someone that can. This is actually quite common, a lot of IT consulting companies work with free and open source software. Individual people may be fore or against licensing software under the GPL, that's fine. But all users no matter how much of a programmer they are can benefit from GPL'd software and there are plenty of examples of both types of users that do so.
It looks like the Xpdf web page is inconsistent. I got this from the README:
License & Distribution
Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Pulbic License (GPL), version 2
or 3. This means that you can distribute derivatives of Xpdf under
any of the following:
- GPL v2 only
- GPL v3 only
- GPL v2 or v3
The Xpdf source package includes the text of both GPL versions:
COPYING for GPL v2, COPYING3 for GPL v3.
Please note that Xpdf is NOT licensed under "any later version" of the
GPL, as I have no idea what those versions will look like.
If you are redistributing unmodified copies of Xpdf (or any of the
Xpdf tools) in binary form, you need to include all of the
documentation: README, man pages (or help files), COPYING, and
COPYING3.
If you want to incorporate the Xpdf source code into another program
(or create a modified version of Xpdf), and you are distributing that
program, you have two options: release your program under the GPL (v2
and/or v3), or purchase a commercial Xpdf source license.
If you're interested in commercial licensing, please see the Glyph &
Cog web site:
Xpdf is dual licensed under both GPLv2 and GPLv3 since some time ago. You can choose either one or both. I assume the author has collected permission from all contributors to do this.
There are lots of libraries under GPL. Poppler is for example dual licensed under both GPLv2 and GPLv3, since it's based on xpdf and inherits its license. A more liberate license would probably be more optimal for this kind of library but using proper GPL is not unheard of. Someone can of course create their own independent implementation if they want to.
Yeah, doesn't this require that all software that supports the format needs to be released as GPLv3 as well?
Who's bright idea was that?
The reference implementation is under GPLv3. Everyone is of course still free to create their own implementation and license it under whichever license they want.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have two versions installed at the same time?
This is trivial to do with systemd-analyze. systemd-analyze dot | dot -Tsvg > systemd.svg.
Perhaps the people that care about non-systemd does not contribute well enough to UPower? I'm not familiar with the UPower project, but in general if people want something to happen the best thing to do is usually to pick up the task and just do it.
The decision to drop stderr has made my life hell. I wish systemd guys understood how important it is to those of us that run servers.
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but there has not been any "decision to drop stderr". It's clearly possible to set where it should go:
StandardError=
Controls where file descriptor 2 (STDERR) of the executed processes is connected to. The available options are identical to those of StandardOutput=, with one exception: if set to inherit the file descriptor used for standard output is duplicated for standard error. This setting defaults to the value set with DefaultStandardError= in systemd-system.conf(5), which defaults to inherit.
It shows exactly how they relate. Units have dependencies instead of just a sequence number. You can see exactly what depends on what.
And you're saying it's systemds fault that MATE has chosen to depend on a component that ships as part of systemd?
Seams suboptimal to make such operation depend on how much RAM is available.
that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.
So, rm -rf /* then?
If it's GNU dd you might want to add the oflag=direct option. Otherwise writes will just buffer up in memory before Linux decides to actually write them to disk.
Unless they already run as root.
That there's no point in talking about "how Unix works" since Unix has never been consistent unless you're talking about some of the really old AT&T releases. Once there were multiple Unix vendors things started changing all the time. What we're seeing now in the Linux space is no different from what has always been the case.
Unix is an evolving class of operating systems and they work the way we make them work. Sometimes we come up with new ideas that may or may not improve it. Almost no one agrees that Unix of the 90s was at perfection and that nothing would ever have to be changed again.
That's correct. My point was not that it was easy for all programs, just that the original statement that using the GPL makes it hard to even use the library as part of another program simply isn't true at all. It would assume that no program is licensed under GPL, and that certainly isn't the case.
It's not hard at all, as long as the program is also under a compatible version of the GPL.
In that case then that will provide good feedback for GPLv4. That's why the "or later" clause is needed, so that the license can be upgraded when bugs in the old license is found.
If you pass on that binary to someone else then you will have to offer him or her the source code to the full application. If you never distribute the binary then you don't have to release anything.
I actually have read it. It's a fine book.
Users that lack the ability to change the software themselves can of course ask someone else to do it for them, either for free or for compensation. This is not at all the case with proprietary software. The vendor may of course choose to change the software for you but you have no such guarantees. Microsoft is not going to make fundamental changes to Windows or most of their other products if you ask them. With free software you are not locked in to the original vendor, you can ask anyone else to do changes for you.
It's too simplistic to think of users and developers as separate entities and to say that the GPL is anti any of those is just ridiculous. Even users without a desire to write programs can have an interest in the source code. Even though they may not have the required skill and knowledge to modify the software themselves they may contract that job to someone that can. This is actually quite common, a lot of IT consulting companies work with free and open source software. Individual people may be fore or against licensing software under the GPL, that's fine. But all users no matter how much of a programmer they are can benefit from GPL'd software and there are plenty of examples of both types of users that do so.
It looks like the Xpdf web page is inconsistent. I got this from the README:
License & Distribution
Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Pulbic License (GPL), version 2
or 3. This means that you can distribute derivatives of Xpdf under
any of the following:
- GPL v2 only
- GPL v3 only
- GPL v2 or v3
The Xpdf source package includes the text of both GPL versions:
COPYING for GPL v2, COPYING3 for GPL v3.
Please note that Xpdf is NOT licensed under "any later version" of the
GPL, as I have no idea what those versions will look like.
If you are redistributing unmodified copies of Xpdf (or any of the
Xpdf tools) in binary form, you need to include all of the
documentation: README, man pages (or help files), COPYING, and
COPYING3.
If you want to incorporate the Xpdf source code into another program
(or create a modified version of Xpdf), and you are distributing that
program, you have two options: release your program under the GPL (v2
and/or v3), or purchase a commercial Xpdf source license.
If you're interested in commercial licensing, please see the Glyph &
Cog web site:
http://www.glyphandcog.com/
Users are free because they have access to the source code, have the freedom to learn from it, change it and/or pass it along.
Xpdf is dual licensed under both GPLv2 and GPLv3 since some time ago. You can choose either one or both. I assume the author has collected permission from all contributors to do this.
Not at all. The goal of free software is that users should have freedom.
There are lots of libraries under GPL. Poppler is for example dual licensed under both GPLv2 and GPLv3, since it's based on xpdf and inherits its license. A more liberate license would probably be more optimal for this kind of library but using proper GPL is not unheard of. Someone can of course create their own independent implementation if they want to.
Yeah, doesn't this require that all software that supports the format needs to be released as GPLv3 as well?
Who's bright idea was that?
The reference implementation is under GPLv3. Everyone is of course still free to create their own implementation and license it under whichever license they want.