It seems KDE wanted to start early and get to business, so they chose QT from trolltech, but Gnome wanted to stand completely on its own so they developed GTK to build the rest on.
KDE chose QT because it was a mature environment to build on but is was non-free. The first reaction to this was to build Gnome, but that did not lessen the popularity of KDE. KDE also had a bit of a headstart on Gnome. The second reaction was that Debian refused to distibute KDE since it was GPL-ed but relied on a GPL-incompatible license (so if you consider linking as "creating a derivative product", it was illegal to distribute). By that time initiatives had started for project Harmony which was a QT replacement. All this and especially the pressure that Debian's policy caused resulted in TrollTech to dual-license their QT libraries - one of these licenses being the GPL.
How much is KDE tied to proprietary software? I'm getting scared now...
Don't be. KDE is GPLed and linked to a GPLed library.
Any reasonable lawyer, not working for one of the sides in this issue, would say that substantial doubt surrounds the enforceability of shrinkwrap licenses in the United States.
I am afraid that case law has already established the legality of shrinkwrap licenses in the US. This happened in Procd, Inc. v. Zeidenberg.
-- If you are a citizen of one of the EU countries, please make your voice heard against patents in software. See FFII for more datails. Thank you
I am Dutch. The Netherlands is part of Europe and as such I am also a European. In the same context a Guyanese is also an American, since Guyana is part of the American continent. What's more, Amerigo Vespucci supposedly landed for the first time on the north coast of South America, most likely where Guyana currently lies. So I'd say a Guyanese is very American...
And, on a side note, I believe that the portion of the continent upon which the U.S. sits was originally dubbed "America" (after some cartographer, I believe), and the term was later extended into Canada and the southern continent. So I guess maybe technically (and out of simplicity) we could call ourselves Americans.
That is incorrect. America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian who sailed to "the Indies" shortly after Columbus did. AFAIK he sailed to the Americas twice and both times he landed on South America. Apparently the continent was named after him since he was the first to discover that America was not part of Asia, as Columbus assumed.
RMS had nothing to do with XFree86, which is arguably as important to Linux today as the command-line tools. Similarly, there are other parts of the system developed by others (Mozilla) which are not part of the GNU Project.
The difference is that MIT and Mozilla never intended to write an OS to begin with. Remove X, KDE , Gnome, Mozilla and LaTeX, and you still have an OS. Remove ls, bash, ld, find, grep etc and you are in deep trouble.
GNU has allways stated that their very purpose for existing is to write a free OS named GNU, and that is what they have been doing since 1984. Dropping in a kernel into that existing system does not make it any less GNU, so IMVHO the name GNU/Linux is more than justified. If you need a shorter name, call it GNU.
1) Microsoft is not on a crusade against Open Source, or Free Software. It is on a crusade against the GPL. Notice the BSD license is perfectly valid under this license.
I don't think BSDLed code would be valid under this license, since the BSDL puts no restrictions on the code, not even relicensing it under the GPL. But since Microsoft's license reads:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires
in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
(emphasis mine) there will need to be at least the restriction not to relicense it under the GPL.
Re:Huge crytography implications!
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
This would only be true if you could prove that RSA or any other public key algorithm is NP *complete*, i.e. there exists an algorithm that would convert RSA into a known NP-complete problem (like TSP) in polynomial time.
AFAIK such algorithm is unknown to date.
It attempted to make use of a buffer overflow to gain access to propigate.
Did it? Can you throw in a couple of URLs? AFAIK the "bliss" virus only demonstrated that a *nix executable can be modified to propagate a virus, it didn't gain any access, hence the danger was limited to binaries that are writable by the user.
maybe release a patch to/usr/bin/whois so that we can stop before receiving the data itself, in case we don't agree?
From the server side this will be hard to do, given the complex nature of the WHOIS protocol <g> (see RFC812 for details).
I wonder if this "agreement" would be somehow enforcable (AFAIK the agreements in EULAs are enforcable in the US by the court ruling in ProCD v. Zeidenberg).
I agree with you wholeheartedly. We will go flat on our face if we don't react to this. There is one catch though, the fact that identical hardware should be used. I think it would more fair to use similar hardware, so we can choose the brand of the NICs and SCSI cards that are better supported.
Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
Oh I can recall the kernel panics so well on SCO Openserver SMP systems when a Windows client tried to connect with TUN NFS. What did they do when we (the place I used to work) mentioned this? They said that TUN NFS was implemented wrong. Nice justification of a kernel panic. They patched it by now, but it took well over 6 months and it's costed my former POW quite a couple of bucks in support actions...
There's a slight difference btw the dinosaurs a couple of million years ago and this one. The former didn't see the meteor coming. This one did. It only needs to realize that the meteor has already struck and that by now it is dead and smelling...
In the may 1993 edition of a dutch PC Magazine someone compared the then available version of Linux (Slackware distro, kernel 0.9x.xx) with SCO unix (version 3.2-4.2). There was one field where SCO was better, DOS Merge vs dosemu. In every other field there was really no competition and the gap has been widening ever since. I especially loved the final comment about SCO in the article: "if you need to know the price it is definately not for you" (translated freely).
I am an SCO ACE and have worked with quite a few SCO boxen to this date. Except for thinking you can sue someone when something goes wrong, I can see absolutely no reason why anybody would want to pick SCO over Linux. Neither Openserver nor Unixware.
This License shall be governed by the Laws of the Unites States and the State of California except that body of California law concerning conflicts of law.
Doesn't this imply the same? I only wonder whether this violates the OSD.
I also wonder what the United Nations convention is, that they expressly excluded in 13.6
CAVEAT: IANAL
Hey, that's Seebs' mom!
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
I'm not subscribed to c.l.c and still I knew I came across the name before. Altavista quickly gave me 217 hits on the name. He's like high provile;-)
If you check their main whitepapers page you will notice that they did two similar studies previously, one between Netware and NT and one between Solaris and NT. In both cases they compared the price/performance of the OSes involved. They didn't this time. Might I conclude that thay have a selective observation?
Correction. It is not a summary, but the "Conclusions" chapter from the real report. I should be completely out of my mind to pay $995 for the other chapters that led to this FUD.
If they want to compare Linux' scalabilaty with Solaris, then that's fine with me, because I don't see Linux running on a 10000 yet, but to say that NT has a better scalabilaty is laughable at least.
they weren't using the phrase "Open Source", they were using the phrase "open source", in the same way that one can use the phrase "windows" but not "Windows".
Cute. I think I will modify a Linux Mandrake distribution and call it "windows nt".
They should say nothing about the law. Not including some law in your license doesn't exclude the user from abiding it. Including some law in your license OTOH, extends the jurisdiction of that law to places where there was no previous jurisdiction.
If you think this is boring, filter it away in your preferences. I don't think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
KDE chose QT because it was a mature environment to build on but is was non-free. The first reaction to this was to build Gnome, but that did not lessen the popularity of KDE. KDE also had a bit of a headstart on Gnome. The second reaction was that Debian refused to distibute KDE since it was GPL-ed but relied on a GPL-incompatible license (so if you consider linking as "creating a derivative product", it was illegal to distribute). By that time initiatives had started for project Harmony which was a QT replacement. All this and especially the pressure that Debian's policy caused resulted in TrollTech to dual-license their QT libraries - one of these licenses being the GPL.
Don't be. KDE is GPLed and linked to a GPLed library.
I am afraid that case law has already established the legality of shrinkwrap licenses in the US. This happened in Procd, Inc. v. Zeidenberg.
--
If you are a citizen of one of the EU countries, please make your voice heard against patents in software. See FFII for more datails.
Thank you
I am Dutch. The Netherlands is part of Europe and as such I am also a European. In the same context a Guyanese is also an American, since Guyana is part of the American continent. What's more, Amerigo Vespucci supposedly landed for the first time on the north coast of South America, most likely where Guyana currently lies. So I'd say a Guyanese is very American...
The difference is that MIT and Mozilla never intended to write an OS to begin with. Remove X, KDE , Gnome, Mozilla and LaTeX, and you still have an OS. Remove ls, bash, ld, find, grep etc and you are in deep trouble.
GNU has allways stated that their very purpose for existing is to write a free OS named GNU, and that is what they have been doing since 1984. Dropping in a kernel into that existing system does not make it any less GNU, so IMVHO the name GNU/Linux is more than justified. If you need a shorter name, call it GNU.
(emphasis mine) there will need to be at least the restriction not to relicense it under the GPL.
This would only be true if you could prove that RSA or any other public key algorithm is NP *complete*, i.e. there exists an algorithm that would convert RSA into a known NP-complete problem (like TSP) in polynomial time.
AFAIK such algorithm is unknown to date.
This one is my absolute favourite. Platform independant and cute ;-)
Rob has clearly put out the poll for "the most powerful doctor" too early. Linus is by far the post powerful doctor.
From the server side this will be hard to do, given the complex nature of the WHOIS protocol <g> (see RFC812 for details).
I wonder if this "agreement" would be somehow enforcable (AFAIK the agreements in EULAs are enforcable in the US by the court ruling in ProCD v. Zeidenberg).
I agree with you wholeheartedly. We will go flat on our face if we don't react to this. There is one catch though, the fact that identical hardware should be used. I think it would more fair to use similar hardware, so we can choose the brand of the NICs and SCSI cards that are better supported.
Oh I can recall the kernel panics so well on SCO Openserver SMP systems when a Windows client tried to connect with TUN NFS. What did they do when we (the place I used to work) mentioned this? They said that TUN NFS was implemented wrong. Nice justification of a kernel panic. They patched it by now, but it took well over 6 months and it's costed my former POW quite a couple of bucks in support actions...
There's a slight difference btw the dinosaurs a couple of million years ago and this one. The former didn't see the meteor coming. This one did. It only needs to realize that the meteor has already struck and that by now it is dead and smelling...
In the may 1993 edition of a dutch PC Magazine someone compared the then available version of Linux (Slackware distro, kernel 0.9x.xx) with SCO unix (version 3.2-4.2). There was one field where SCO was better, DOS Merge vs dosemu. In every other field there was really no competition and the gap has been widening ever since. I especially loved the final comment about SCO in the article: "if you need to know the price it is definately not for you" (translated freely).
I am an SCO ACE and have worked with quite a few SCO boxen to this date. Except for thinking you can sue someone when something goes wrong, I can see absolutely no reason why anybody would want to pick SCO over Linux. Neither Openserver nor Unixware.
APSL1.1 section 13.7:
This License shall be governed by the Laws of the Unites States and the State of California except that body of California law concerning conflicts of law.
Doesn't this imply the same? I only wonder whether this violates the OSD.
I also wonder what the United Nations convention is, that they expressly excluded in 13.6
CAVEAT: IANAL
I'm not subscribed to c.l.c and still I knew I came across the name before. Altavista quickly gave me 217 hits on the name. He's like high provile ;-)
If you check their main whitepapers page you will notice that they did two similar studies previously, one between Netware and NT and one between Solaris and NT. In both cases they compared the price/performance of the OSes involved. They didn't this time. Might I conclude that thay have a selective observation?
BTW, how many CPU's are in Dave Millers Ulrapenguin box?
If they want to compare Linux' scalabilaty with Solaris, then that's fine with me, because I don't see Linux running on a 10000 yet, but to say that NT has a better scalabilaty is laughable at least.
Cute. I think I will modify a Linux Mandrake distribution and call it "windows nt".
If you think this is boring, filter it away in your preferences. I don't think it is.
Cheers,
Rob