Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License
So what about writing a non-GPL program that links to readline? I am not copying, distributing or modifying readline, so why the prohibition against it?
with no licence....the most restrictive possible situation is legally assumed.
Having had a recent conversation with a lawyer on the subject of licenses, he assures me that such a situation would not be true.
If *all* of the GPL were invalidated, then it would become equivalent to "Copyright (c) by Author". This would remove most of the permissions granted in the GPL, but would also remove some of the restrictions! According to this lawyer, the courts treat licenses as contracts (I disagree that they should be, but that's another story). Thus, but accepting the GPL, you are waiving some rights that you already have under copyright.
If Carmack doesn't win and this mod maker guy does, then I'm very likely going to change the license agreement on the game I'm making (which does operate in this manner) from GPLed source code to either closed source or some license agreement which gives me more control.
Is that what you think the GPL is? A way to get more control? Glad to see that you GPL advocates are finally getting honest.
"if he can make this hold up in court..., then the GPL is screwed and we can all pretty much kiss the Open Source movement goodbye"
The Open Source movement is much more than the GPL. A court ruling could stike a fatal blow to copyleft and GNU licenses, but it would hardly affect any of the other Free Software licenses, particularly the unrestricted licenses.
"Out of all the word processors mentioned, none of them really pay homage to the traditional UNIX way of doing things, namely small programs that do small things really well, chained together through IO redirections and pipes."
I'm not sure that this traditional Unix way fits at all in a GUI environment. Yes, it's nice to have a GUI app that's small and does just one thing well, but the other half of the Unix way requires that everything be a filter. How the hell do you do filtering on a desktop? Draw lines from the file icon to xspellcheck icon to xLaTex icon and then to the printer icon?
One way that KDE2 is keeping this "small is beautiful" and "everything works together" philosophy is through components. It works much, much differently but keeps the simplicity and flexibility.
"LyX does come closest though. It uses LaTeX as the underlying format, and processes files through dvips to make postscript output. If you want to edit the underlying format by hand, you'll find that it is nice plain old LaTeX code"
Don't forget that KLyX is still a KDE application, and may very well be made an official part of KOffice. Take a good look at KWord though. Underneath it, and all of KOffice, is XML. It's all hand editable. It also makes writing filters a snap. Talk about the "Unix way", you can write a KWord to abiWord filter with sed! If you can't do anything with with XML using those beloved unix filters, you've lost all sense of imagination.
Even KImageShop uses XML as its base. The actual layers, brushes, etc, are in PNG, but wrapped together with XML, then gzipped up to save space.
"If I don't like MFC (which sucks by the way) I can use OWL. Or I could ignore Win32 altogether and use SDL or the cygwin environment. In the end, all I'm saying is that having all these seperate APIs degrades Linux's ease of use, performance and stability."
How can you go from mentioning the positive that Windows has four APIs (you forgot Qt) to the negative that Linux has too many with just two?
But you've ignored the question of who enforces the standard. Who would you appoint to tell KDE users that they have to stop? Who gets the job of telling the Gnome developers what their new API is going to be?
The real beauty of Free Software is that no one is in charge. No one is able to pin it down and make it conform. Not Redhat, not SuSE. Not even GNU. Not even Linus. One can only be in charge of their own property, and when thousands come together and share their property with each other in a grand potlatch, they'll brook no king.
Re:Like Democracy, choice yeilds two majorities ..
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Was he a member when GNOME (the original not the KDE clone) started? It's no wonder he's a member. He even has the RMS trait of taking offense when a member of the media calls Gnome Open Source software.
Re:You are still confused.
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Giving Back
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"You are not allowed to profit from other peoples hard work if they don't want you to. That's what the GPL is all about."
Boy, now I'm confused as all get out. Are you saying I can't profit off of GPL software? What the hell is Cygnus then? What about Redhat, SuSE, Corel? Hell, even Cheapbytes deserves a lawsuit I guess.
"EM>I just don't see where you are getting this from. I serously doubt RMS wants power and control."
You just finished telling us that RMS is collecting a community to fight the corporations with! You just got through telling us that RMS could have ruled the world if he had used patents! Make up your mind. If you argue out of both sides of your mouth you end up spouting gibberish.
Re:Why are you people so dense?
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Giving Back
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"He then was able to activate a huge community to join him in his quest to fight corporations."
I thought you just told me his goal was the creation of Free Software. Now you tell me his goal is to fight corporations. And you wonder why people accuse the FSF of being anti-commercial!
"If he had just patented all of his code in the beggining he would rule the world."
Was that Richard's goal? To rule the world? I'm glad you got that out in the open instead of hiding behind the rhetoric of "free" and "voluntary".
"Make a Linux API...Adopt either Qt or GTK, (preferably GTK) and strip out all the widget stuff...so it can function as a full API for the system."
You're forgetting two big roadblocks for your scheme. First, where are the API Police going to get the authority to enforce your rule? If you remember, Redhat tried to standardize on Gnome and inadvertently spun off Mandrake in the process. Second, Open Source is more than just Linux (why do you guys keep forgetting this!). Both Gnome and KDE run on *every* Unix system, both free and proprietary. If you managed to get your way and mandated a standard Linux API, you would end up locking out non-Linux source code. An application that currently runs on every unix-like system would end up working only on Linux, or on every other unix but Linux.
Democracy frequently yields more than two viable choices. It is only the US system of winner-take-all at the precinct level that caused the two party system. In many democratic nations, if party C gets 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats.
But that's neither here nor there.
"BSD and System-V" - trivial. They're just two variants of the same system.
"VI[M] and Emacs" - what about "classic" vi and elvis and vile? What about XEmacs? What about joe and jed? What about xedit, kwrite, and gnotepad?
"RedHat and Debian" - Hah! Redhat may be the current marketing winner, but no one has any clear title to number two. But this is a topic on Gnome, and Gnome runs on a lot more than Linux! So don't forget BSDs or the commercial unices...
"Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt" - Okay, you got one. But it's only a temporary win. Considering how quickly these desktops came on the scene, it's very plausible that one or both could be shoved aside with next year's entry. Just think of the possibilities inherent in an "Enlightenment Widget Kit", or if GNUstep decides to suddenly take off!
The point is, when you try to divide up the world into halves, you're always going to fail.
Re:Like Democracy, choice yeilds two majorities ..
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"Gnome was Miguel's answer to KDE, and later was adopted by the FSF....but that is a story in itself, since I thought WindowMaker was initially adopted as the 'official' environment of the FSF."
Hmmm, why is it that no one ever joins GNU, but everyone keeps getting declared a part of it? I remember the day when WindowMaker was adopted. The WindowMaker page had a statement similar to "Apparently, we are now the official window manager of the GNU Project..."
Embrace and Extend. It's what condemn Microsoft for doing. Embrace a standard, then extend it so no one else can use it without you.
Yet this is precisely what glibc is doing. It's taking a language and library that is firmly standardized, then adding its own extensions, so that developers end up being locked into the GNU toolset. I tried to compile a program that other day on Solaris. It failed miserably because it depended upon GNU extensions to the "standard" C library. Sure I can load up glibc to run it, but why should I when I've got a perfectly capable and standardized libc? GNU libc tries to be everything including the kitchen sink (sound familiar?).
GNU would do everyone a lot better if they kept their extensions separate from the standard.
"Problems in software design are not solved by abstracting things away from the implementer. It amounts to hiding the dust under the carpet."
And excellent argument for abandoning C and sticking with assembly:-)
But you're missing the whole point of OO. If you have a problem that lends itself to OO abstractions, then it makes every bit of sense to use OO. Like it or not, every programmer uses abstractions. I mean, you not programming with just bytes still, are you? Thankfully, we now have bytes, chars, ints, uints, floats, and bools, as well as strings, arrays, sets, enums and structs. And there are a lot of problem sets that are easier to abstract to objects than to algorithms.
As a case in point, take a look at X programming and widgets. Qt is C++, and even though GTK+ is written in vanilla C, it still uses OO like abstractions. That's because it makes *sense* to think of widgets as objects. A pushbutton is more than just an area in memory 30-40 bytes long. If you need to make a toggle button, it makes more sense to start with a pushbutton than to rewrite every bit of pushbutton code from scratch.
I struggled for years with C. But with C++, I was more productive than ever after only three months. That's because C was a metaphorical hammer that made every problem look like an algorithm. But C++ gives me more choices in how I can break a problem down. With C++ I can choose between algorithm-oriented or object-oriented methodologies.
Re:This article makes me sick!
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Oh yes, I did voluntarily redistribute some of my paltry wages around LWCE. And I tipped some developers I met. And everyone I knew whose software I was using got at least a hearty thank you. That included Linus and Richard.
"Here's a flyer. Please put some money in the can so we can continue providing you with more free software."
I've been involved with a lot of non-profit organizations. Putting out a can to collect donations in never brought in much money. You don't host a free dance and then sell tickets for a ten dollar donations. However, I found out a lot of things that worked. People like to buy so sell stuff.
Here's a better idea... Burn a few hundred CDs with the latest Gnome on them and sell them for $5 apiece. "Only available here! Tomorrow's Gnome today! Only five bucks. Every Gnome application known included." And then take that now unused ceramic gnome mug and auction it off to the highest bidder.
Re:Notice who was giving the money
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Judging the worth of people based on their net worth is wrong. It is JUST AS WRONG to base the worth of people on their lack of net worth.
I indeed have ample amounts of charity and compassion. But I have no patience with those who condemn others based solely on their bank accounts.
Re:A lot of anti-FSF attitude going around
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There are thousands of political organizations with very unpopular stances on touchy issues that are rolling in donor cash.
The Free Software Foundation doesn't get donations from the computer industry in the same way that the Sierra Club doesn't get donations from the lumber industry. Even though the Sierra Club honestly feels that its policies will ultimately help the lumber industry in the long run, they aren't not so naive as to waste their time soliciting donation from sawmills and lumberjacks. If the FSF desires more funding, it needs to look outside the software creation industry. As long as they state in the GNU Manifesto that programmers should not make more money than salesclerks, then they should not be surprised when the majority of programmers do not contribute.
Re:Why are you people so dense?
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Giving Back
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Where and when did RMS say he wanted to "ban proprietary software"?
(www.gnu.org/fsf/fsf.html) To quote: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding, and modification of computer programs."
You may be right that RMS never comes out and promotes an elimination of proprietary software through the means of force and legislation. However, when he equates Free Software to Free Speech it seems obvious to me that he desires equal legal protection for it. If they're both the same, then legal injunctions against denying someone the right to speak are equivalent to legal injunctions against denying someone the right to modify or redistribute software.
Slashdot Mirror
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License
So what about writing a non-GPL program that links to readline? I am not copying, distributing or modifying readline, so why the prohibition against it?
with no licence....the most restrictive possible situation is legally assumed.
Having had a recent conversation with a lawyer on the subject of licenses, he assures me that such a situation would not be true.
If *all* of the GPL were invalidated, then it would become equivalent to "Copyright (c) by Author". This would remove most of the permissions granted in the GPL, but would also remove some of the restrictions! According to this lawyer, the courts treat licenses as contracts (I disagree that they should be, but that's another story). Thus, but accepting the GPL, you are waiving some rights that you already have under copyright.
If Carmack doesn't win and this mod maker guy does, then I'm very likely going to change the license agreement on the game I'm making (which does operate in this manner) from GPLed source code to either closed source or some license agreement which gives me more control .
Is that what you think the GPL is? A way to get more control? Glad to see that you GPL advocates are finally getting honest.
"if he can make this hold up in court..., then the GPL is screwed and we can all pretty much kiss the Open Source movement goodbye"
The Open Source movement is much more than the GPL. A court ruling could stike a fatal blow to copyleft and GNU licenses, but it would hardly affect any of the other Free Software licenses, particularly the unrestricted licenses.
What about 3DLabs! Does the X world think 3D revolves around 3dfx and voodoo?
"type differences? Sure, no problem with overloading in C++, but..."
C++ is much more strongly typed than C. Consider the following sample C program
main() {
char mid_initial;
int is_okay;
float your_wage;
if (mid_initial) {
printf("the result is %d", your_wage/is_okay);
}
return;
}
"(speaking of beer, check out www.borg.no for the homepages of Borg Breweries in Norway. No english info, unfortunately :)
:-)
:)
Okay, you're pluggin your beer, I'll plug mine
(speaking of free beer, check out www.meer.net/~arandir/code.html for home brewing software. English info, fortunately
If it's ported to KDE2, then it uses Qt2.1, which means that everything about it is free. Last I heard, LyX still used xforms.
"Out of all the word processors mentioned, none of them really pay homage to the traditional UNIX way of doing things, namely small programs that do small things really well, chained together through IO redirections and pipes."
I'm not sure that this traditional Unix way fits at all in a GUI environment. Yes, it's nice to have a GUI app that's small and does just one thing well, but the other half of the Unix way requires that everything be a filter. How the hell do you do filtering on a desktop? Draw lines from the file icon to xspellcheck icon to xLaTex icon and then to the printer icon?
One way that KDE2 is keeping this "small is beautiful" and "everything works together" philosophy is through components. It works much, much differently but keeps the simplicity and flexibility.
"LyX does come closest though. It uses LaTeX as the underlying format, and processes files through dvips to make postscript output. If you want to edit the underlying format by hand, you'll find that it is nice plain old LaTeX code"
Don't forget that KLyX is still a KDE application, and may very well be made an official part of KOffice. Take a good look at KWord though. Underneath it, and all of KOffice, is XML. It's all hand editable. It also makes writing filters a snap. Talk about the "Unix way", you can write a KWord to abiWord filter with sed! If you can't do anything with with XML using those beloved unix filters, you've lost all sense of imagination.
Even KImageShop uses XML as its base. The actual layers, brushes, etc, are in PNG, but wrapped together with XML, then gzipped up to save space.
"If I don't like MFC (which sucks by the way) I can use OWL. Or I could ignore Win32 altogether and use SDL or the cygwin environment. In the end, all I'm saying is that having all these seperate APIs degrades Linux's ease of use, performance and stability."
How can you go from mentioning the positive that Windows has four APIs (you forgot Qt) to the negative that Linux has too many with just two?
But you've ignored the question of who enforces the standard. Who would you appoint to tell KDE users that they have to stop? Who gets the job of telling the Gnome developers what their new API is going to be?
The real beauty of Free Software is that no one is in charge. No one is able to pin it down and make it conform. Not Redhat, not SuSE. Not even GNU. Not even Linus. One can only be in charge of their own property, and when thousands come together and share their property with each other in a grand potlatch, they'll brook no king.
Was he a member when GNOME (the original not the KDE clone) started? It's no wonder he's a member. He even has the RMS trait of taking offense when a member of the media calls Gnome Open Source software.
Doh! Lash myself with a wet noodle...
"You are not allowed to profit from other peoples hard work if they don't want you to. That's what the GPL is all about."
Boy, now I'm confused as all get out. Are you saying I can't profit off of GPL software? What the hell is Cygnus then? What about Redhat, SuSE, Corel? Hell, even Cheapbytes deserves a lawsuit I guess.
"EM>I just don't see where you are getting this from. I serously doubt RMS wants power and control."
You just finished telling us that RMS is collecting a community to fight the corporations with! You just got through telling us that RMS could have ruled the world if he had used patents! Make up your mind. If you argue out of both sides of your mouth you end up spouting gibberish.
"He then was able to activate a huge community to join him in his quest to fight corporations."
I thought you just told me his goal was the creation of Free Software. Now you tell me his goal is to fight corporations. And you wonder why people accuse the FSF of being anti-commercial!
"If he had just patented all of his code in the beggining he would rule the world."
Was that Richard's goal? To rule the world? I'm glad you got that out in the open instead of hiding behind the rhetoric of "free" and "voluntary".
"Make a Linux API...Adopt either Qt or GTK, (preferably GTK) and strip out all the widget stuff...so it can function as a full API for the system."
You're forgetting two big roadblocks for your scheme. First, where are the API Police going to get the authority to enforce your rule? If you remember, Redhat tried to standardize on Gnome and inadvertently spun off Mandrake in the process. Second, Open Source is more than just Linux (why do you guys keep forgetting this!). Both Gnome and KDE run on *every* Unix system, both free and proprietary. If you managed to get your way and mandated a standard Linux API, you would end up locking out non-Linux source code. An application that currently runs on every unix-like system would end up working only on Linux, or on every other unix but Linux.
Democracy frequently yields more than two viable choices. It is only the US system of winner-take-all at the precinct level that caused the two party system. In many democratic nations, if party C gets 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats.
But that's neither here nor there.
"BSD and System-V" - trivial. They're just two variants of the same system.
"VI[M] and Emacs" - what about "classic" vi and elvis and vile? What about XEmacs? What about joe and jed? What about xedit, kwrite, and gnotepad?
"RedHat and Debian" - Hah! Redhat may be the current marketing winner, but no one has any clear title to number two. But this is a topic on Gnome, and Gnome runs on a lot more than Linux! So don't forget BSDs or the commercial unices...
"Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt" - Okay, you got one. But it's only a temporary win. Considering how quickly these desktops came on the scene, it's very plausible that one or both could be shoved aside with next year's entry. Just think of the possibilities inherent in an "Enlightenment Widget Kit", or if GNUstep decides to suddenly take off!
The point is, when you try to divide up the world into halves, you're always going to fail.
"Gnome was Miguel's answer to KDE, and later was adopted by the FSF....but that is a story in itself, since I thought WindowMaker was initially adopted as the 'official' environment of the FSF."
Hmmm, why is it that no one ever joins GNU, but everyone keeps getting declared a part of it? I remember the day when WindowMaker was adopted. The WindowMaker page had a statement similar to "Apparently, we are now the official window manager of the GNU Project..."
Embrace and Extend. It's what condemn Microsoft for doing. Embrace a standard, then extend it so no one else can use it without you.
Yet this is precisely what glibc is doing. It's taking a language and library that is firmly standardized, then adding its own extensions, so that developers end up being locked into the GNU toolset. I tried to compile a program that other day on Solaris. It failed miserably because it depended upon GNU extensions to the "standard" C library. Sure I can load up glibc to run it, but why should I when I've got a perfectly capable and standardized libc? GNU libc tries to be everything including the kitchen sink (sound familiar?).
GNU would do everyone a lot better if they kept their extensions separate from the standard.
"Problems in software design are not solved by abstracting things away from the implementer. It amounts to hiding the dust under the carpet."
:-)
And excellent argument for abandoning C and sticking with assembly
But you're missing the whole point of OO. If you have a problem that lends itself to OO abstractions, then it makes every bit of sense to use OO. Like it or not, every programmer uses abstractions. I mean, you not programming with just bytes still, are you? Thankfully, we now have bytes, chars, ints, uints, floats, and bools, as well as strings, arrays, sets, enums and structs. And there are a lot of problem sets that are easier to abstract to objects than to algorithms.
As a case in point, take a look at X programming and widgets. Qt is C++, and even though GTK+ is written in vanilla C, it still uses OO like abstractions. That's because it makes *sense* to think of widgets as objects. A pushbutton is more than just an area in memory 30-40 bytes long. If you need to make a toggle button, it makes more sense to start with a pushbutton than to rewrite every bit of pushbutton code from scratch.
I struggled for years with C. But with C++, I was more productive than ever after only three months. That's because C was a metaphorical hammer that made every problem look like an algorithm. But C++ gives me more choices in how I can break a problem down. With C++ I can choose between algorithm-oriented or object-oriented methodologies.
Oh yes, I did voluntarily redistribute some of my paltry wages around LWCE. And I tipped some developers I met. And everyone I knew whose software I was using got at least a hearty thank you. That included Linus and Richard.
"Here's a flyer. Please put some money in the can so we can continue providing you with more free software."
I've been involved with a lot of non-profit organizations. Putting out a can to collect donations in never brought in much money. You don't host a free dance and then sell tickets for a ten dollar donations. However, I found out a lot of things that worked. People like to buy so sell stuff.
Here's a better idea... Burn a few hundred CDs with the latest Gnome on them and sell them for $5 apiece. "Only available here! Tomorrow's Gnome today! Only five bucks. Every Gnome application known included." And then take that now unused ceramic gnome mug and auction it off to the highest bidder.
Judging the worth of people based on their net worth is wrong. It is JUST AS WRONG to base the worth of people on their lack of net worth.
I indeed have ample amounts of charity and compassion. But I have no patience with those who condemn others based solely on their bank accounts.
There are thousands of political organizations with very unpopular stances on touchy issues that are rolling in donor cash.
The Free Software Foundation doesn't get donations from the computer industry in the same way that the Sierra Club doesn't get donations from the lumber industry. Even though the Sierra Club honestly feels that its policies will ultimately help the lumber industry in the long run, they aren't not so naive as to waste their time soliciting donation from sawmills and lumberjacks. If the FSF desires more funding, it needs to look outside the software creation industry. As long as they state in the GNU Manifesto that programmers should not make more money than salesclerks, then they should not be surprised when the majority of programmers do not contribute.
Where and when did RMS say he wanted to "ban proprietary software"?
(www.gnu.org/fsf/fsf.html) To quote: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding, and modification of computer programs."
You may be right that RMS never comes out and promotes an elimination of proprietary software through the means of force and legislation. However, when he equates Free Software to Free Speech it seems obvious to me that he desires equal legal protection for it. If they're both the same, then legal injunctions against denying someone the right to speak are equivalent to legal injunctions against denying someone the right to modify or redistribute software.