Thanks for the "yeah". The answer to the "so what" is simple — it is hard enough to prevail of the NIH syndrome. Additional concerns over the GPL makes the case for using open source even harder.
Using BSD-licensed open source eliminates those additional concerns.
If GPL'd software is too restrictive then proprietary software would be even more of a straight jacket.
I'm not comparing GPL'd vs. proprietry software. I'm contrasting GPL with BSD-license — the latter being far less restrictive.
About the only reason that I can think of as to why the GPL would be "too restrictive" would be when somebody wants to exploit the works of one set of people solely for their own benefit and at the expense of another set of people.
Tell me now, how is Apple's MacOS "at the expense" of a FreeBSD developer or, indeed, of any other "set of people".
Won't that require some runtime support, like mpirun in MPI (that takes care of rsh/ssh-ing to each node and starting the processes)?
Well, yes, of course. You also need the actual hardware too:-)
This is beyond the scope of the discussion, really — all clusters require a fair amount of work to setup and maintain. But we are talking about coding for them here...
Now try to do what the GP actually said: find a company that first developed a piece of proprietary software, added a piece of F/OSS code to it, and was then forced to open up their original work as a result.
Although such cases likely exist, I don't have to present them here, because I have not spoken of them. The case of Linksys being arm-twisted into releasing their code illustrates my point (not the GGP's apparent interpretation).
That the arm-twisting may have benefited Linksys itself overall (as was credibly suggested by other poster) is not really relevant here — they did not want it, and all of us would've objected to such arm-twisting.
Concerns about such arm-twisting applied to their companies is certainly contributing to managers' fears of Open Source. Justifiably so.
How about owners being able to modify their router firmware? There are _LOTS_ of mods for the WRT54G mainly because of this and the WRT54G enjoys part of its sales because it is so flexible.
Interesting. So, now I aware of the benefits — in this case. Cool.
You can take my garbage. Tuesdays.
I can, of course, but I don't have to. Unlike the poster who dared me to come with an example of something, I simply said, I'm unaware of something (else) — and you informed me...
It was a striped down Linux distro. Ok, they had to put it together, perhaps write some shell scripts.
Well, if that's all it was, why is OpenWRT offered as an example by another responder to my post? Apparently, some work was required to go from a "Linux distro" to "Linksys firmware" — and that work is now available to all because of GPL.
And I'm not saying, it is bad. But it certainly is something, a "PHB" is justified to be concerned about.
Stop spreading FUD. Novell was doing more than simply partnering with Microsoft. They took out what amounted to a patent license in all but words, which would call into question their ability to distribute GPL code.
Whether Novell was right or wrong, the truth remains — they had GPL-related troubles (and may have them again). Had they used BSD-licensed wares, they wouldn't have had these troubles. End of story.
In June 2003 some folks on the Linux Kernel Mailing List sniffed around the WRT54G and found that its firmware was based on Linux components. Because Linux is released under the GNU General Public License, or GPL, the terms of the license obliged Linksys to make available the source code to the WRT54G firmware. As most router firmware is proprietary code, vendors have no such obligation. It remains unclear whether Linksys was aware of the WRT54G's Linux lineage, and its associated source requirements, at the time they released the router. But ultimately, under outside pressure to deliver on their legal obligation under the GPL, Linksys open sourced the WRT54G firmware in July 2003.
Now, you could say, the open-sourced firmware was never proprietary to begin with somehow, but that's just semantics — clearly, Linksys thought of it as proprietary and weren't planning to release the sources until the outside pressure made them do it. I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point.
I dare you.
Now that I've successfully responded to your dare, what will you do? If you are a female, you can scratch my back for 5 minutes. If you are a male, you can take out my garbage — once, this Monday. Make your pick.
And for good reason. Just listening to all the talk on whether or not Novell is violating GPL (perhaps by simply partnering with another vendor - Microsoft) should make a lawyer's skin crawl...
If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption.
So, GPL was used to wrestle a few vendors into releasing their own code. And what? Who has looked into that code or used it for anything else? And how many other vendors have (foolishly) decided to avoid "open source" and come up with their own (usually inferior) re-inventions of the wheel, because of that?
It is hard enough to use an outside solution because of the NIH syndrome. Restrictive licenses exacerbate the problem...
The amount of stuff being produced these days for a consumer would easily overwhelm a consumer with even above-average patience and attention span. This is true in not just music, but in many other sectors/industries (cars, home electronics are other examples).
So, somebody needs to be the "gatekeepers" — we are happy to employ them to avoid missing on the good new stuff while not spending all our time weeding out the bad new stuff. The question is only, who should that be.
In medicines, which we deemed to be too important, we have FDA — a government agency. In everything else there are competing outlets, some of them commercial (think CNet), some not (think Consumer Reports).
The following is a simple truism, but it is needed to counter the article's implicit disapproval: Apple got there, because consumers of music like the work, Apple's experts are doing.
Maybe, it is the dissatisfaction with radio jockeys (think "Payola"), or with MTV, who, presumably, are losing their music gatekeeping role to Apple — I don't know. But should Apple become thought of as abusive of its position, people will switch to others — competition, as is often said, is only a click away.
You can build your OpenMP code and it will run on clusters automatically. Intel's additional pragmas allow you to control, which things you want parallelized over multiple machines vs. multiple CPUs (the former being fairly expensive to setup and keep in sync).
I've also seen messages on gcc's mailing list, that talk about extending gcc's OpenMP implementation (moved from GOMP to mainstream in gcc-4.2) to clusters the same way.
Nothing in OpenMP prevents a particular implementation from offering multi-machine parallelization. Intel's is just the first compiler to get there...
The beauty of it all is that OpenMP is just compiler pragmas — you can always build the same code with them off (or with a non-supporting compiler), and it will still run serially.
which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution
Why do they exclude commercial uses, while allowing political? Personally, I prefer merchants to politicians...
Remember the "No Call List"? Businesses must check it, but politicians don't have to (and their automatic calls are getting increasingly annoying with each elections). At the time, the discrepancy was explained by politicians crafting the exceptions for themselves...
My, how pompous of you to proclaim his arguments wrong and then shove your opinions as being some sort of truth.
The whole thread is about utilitarian approach ("immigration is beneficial" vs. "no it is not") being wrong. He could debate the Human Rights approach I put forward, or he could debate my rejection of the utilitarian, but instead he chose to argue, that it is not beneficial — it is irrelevant... Even if it were detrimental, Human Rights trump those considerations.
"Freedom of Migration is just as unalienable as all other means of Pursuing Happiness."
Only if it works both ways. It doesn't. Mexico? None.
No, a Right does not have to be recognized everywhere to be valid. It may be legal in Tututustan to own slaves, for example. That would not deprive Tututustanis from Right To Liberty, and will not make it legal to hold them as slaves.
Oh please, care to visit southern Texas partner. I think I can show you some stats you'll never forget (if you live through it)
In other words, you don't have any statistics to back up your claims. As suspected...
So it's OK if they're just here illegally.
Yes, it is Ok with me, because I disagree with the particular law. Violating a law is not in itself wrong — what we disapprove is doing whatever act is prohibited, whether it is illegal or not. There need not be a law against murder for me to disapprove of murderers, for example. On the other hand, no amount of laws against illegal immigration will make me disapprove of those, who break them, simply for breaking them.
For another illustration, I remind you, that Rosa Park's famous act was also illegal at the time...
Human Rights are a fantasy.
Well, to me, the Declaration of Independence is a very real document, for example. And that's where the Right to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness are described as Self-Evidentlyunalienable.
The only rights you (we) have were bought on the backs and lifes of those that came before us.
No, these rights can not be alienated from any Man (or Woman, or Hermaphrodite) — according to our own founding document, everyone has them, and always had. Everyone is endowed with them by his Creator. And before you say something about "American citizens only", let me remind you, that Declaration of Independence predates founding of the Constitution by several years and the section I am referring to is perfectly Universal.
By that logic you should just give me everything you have because I want it. Would that be OK with you? Thought not.
Wrong analogy. You can't take my property. But you can buy a house next to me (if you can afford it) and cook the same things for breakfast, if you want to.
You are arguing with way too much passion and too little reason. I don't think, I'll be following-up to you again...
causes huge criminal issues because so many of the vermin crawling across the border are CRIMINALS!!
And the source of your statistics is?..
We've got Mexicans getting busted by the thousands in middle America (not San Diego).
And before that we had Italian Mafia, for example (think "Godfather"). And Irish Mob (Think "Departed"). And Jewish criminals (Think "Once upon a time in America"). And we still have those crimes.
But what are those Mexicans "getting busted by the thousands" for? If their only/main offense is getting here "illegally", then you are exhibiting exactly the circular (thus wrong) argument I described...
Even those that come here to do honest (and educated) work cause problems by driving the price of skilled work down.
And why is an American-born worker entitled to better pay, than a Honduran? By birth right, uhm? That's exactly the "right", on which the King tried to base his sovereignty over us...
They're going to take what they can make and go home
It is their Human Right to do so... Of the self-evident kind...
The following is email junk mail, but has kernels of truth about the "problem" with the current crop of immigrants to the USA. [...] with a different set of rules, one that includes the entitlement card and a guarantee of being faithful to their mother country.
Current, really? Ever heard of Little Italy? Or Chinatown? most big cities in America have ethnic neighborhoods and had them for decades.
This last 4th of July, a group of Italian teenagers in our (heavily Italian) neighborhood was parading with an Italian flag. Why? Because Italy won some soccer match on that day. Yes, a foreign flag in America — on our nation's greatest holiday (during the fireworks, in fact).
Today's immigrants are neither better nor worse then before. The (benign) ties to mother countries, which seem to annoy "real" Americans, are explained simply by better and cheaper communications and transportation.
Yours is a non-argument — you should've kept it in the junk pile...
Because a lot of people have invested heavily in their careers.
You are still debating the utilitarian argument, which is wrong... Your argument is wrong in itself too, of course — nobody owes you a living, no matter how much you invested in yourself. But that's irrelevant to my original point: Freedom of Migration is just as unalienable as all other means of Pursuing Happiness.
As to the poor people in other countries, here's an idea: fix your own damn county instead of piggy-backing on the USA.
Which part of the "Right, which your own ancestors took for granted" was so hard for you to understand?
Unless you are a pure Native American, your own Irish/Jewish/Italian/German/Dutch/etc. [great-...-]grand-parents chose to come here instead of fixing "their own damn countries". But today's Mexican/Chinese/Ukrainian/Guatemalan/Vietnamese/et c. can not?
I'm sure to want to hear about the benefits of driving in diapers.
This part has been explained in the very first news article on the subject. You want to wear diapers, when you can not (or don't want to) be interrupted. Apparently, astronauts wear diapers at launch/re-entry. It is a good idea, because you may spend a while strapped to a chair.
She wanted to get over 900 miles as quickly as possible — without stopping to pee — strapped to the driver seat. This part of her act is not at all crazy.
Novell won't have to compete against workalike knockoffs like Red Hat does.
Not wanting to compete against knockoffs seems very sensible. If GPL stands in Novell's way as you describe, it really is a bomb.
The GPL is only dangerous to companies who try to abuse the community.
How is Novell's desire to remain in full control of Suse (for which it paid a lot of money) "abusive"? And of which community? Community of workalike knockoffs?
It's a purely defensive weapon.
One can bang an enemy's head in with a shield, you know... Also, mines are "purely defensive" too — yet there are loud (and sound) arguments for banning some of them...
Instead of arguing, whether immigrants are useful or detrimental overall, the right argument is based on Human Rights. I simply don't understand, how an American (except, perhaps, the Native Americans) can sleep at night rejecting the right to move to this country to someone else.
The same right his/her ancestors took for granted...
Oh, a common defense goes, my ancestors arrived legally. BS. If today's laws were the same as they were before and during the Ellis Island era, all of today's immigrants would've been legal too.
"Oh, but they are criminals," — goes another. No they are not — the only offense, most of them have committed is only violating the laws against immigration. The circular argument boils down to:
They are bad people.
Why, what's wrong with them?
They break our laws!
Which laws?
Ones, designed to keep them out.
Why do we design such laws?
Because they are bad people. [Go back to 1]
Frankly, I hold the following truth Self-Evident:
Anyone has the right to live, where he/she can afford to and work for anyone, who would hire him/her.
The need to keep out (real) criminals et al. is of no more consequence to the above statement, than the ban on yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is to the Freedom of Speech.
No, it is not a defensive weapon. Just as this very case is showing, a business (Novell) can adapt GPL-licensed software (Suse) and then find itself limited in their choice of other partners (Microsoft). GPL may be defending GNU-license users against suits by Novell/Microsoft, but it is harming Novell beyond the traditionally understood requirement of "provide the source and you'll be fine".
That no one is suing Novell right now, does not mean, no one will — FSF's leadership may change in a few years... It is not a "time bomb" in that an explosion is not certain. It is a remotely-controlled (by FSF and individual authors) bomb — if they decide, you violated the terms, they could sue — potentially winning, and certainly bringing you a ton of bad publicity...
Play by the rules or go away, it is simple as that.
Why, of course! I'm not disputing the rights of people, communes, and corporations to attach any strings to their works. Just arguing, that the particular bundle of strings called "GPL" is more restrictive than many realize...
While modern BSD-licenses don't carry even the controversial "advertising clause" (which merely required a mention of UC Berkeley), GPL is getting aggressively more restrictive to users helping (like commercial licenses do) the authors instead.
I understand, why someone may pick GPL for their own work, but I don't understand, why Novell did not pick a *BSD Operating System to build upon... Apple made a smarter move.
Remember, when the (false) news came out, that OSF/GNU/whatever is going to sue Novell over their deal with Microsoft?
First, when the news was still hot, a number of (Insightful) comments were posted, explaining the issue along the lines of Ms. Tease's argument.
Then, the next day, it was announced, that there are no such plans (for litigation) and the author of the original article was criticized for pulling something out of you-know-where.
Some of the comments (including mine) then reminded, that the "GPL is da bomb", much to the annoyance of GPL fan-boys, who claimed, there is absolutely no danger for a business in mixing it with their own wares.
Here we go the third time around, and GPL really is "da bomb" (no litigation today does not mean, no litigation tomorrow)... Its fans may argue, that it is a weapon in good hands, guarding freedom against proprietary evils — may be. But there is no denying, that it is a weapon (bomb), and that businesses may want to give the idea another thought — or opt for BSD-licensed software instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the "yeah". The answer to the "so what" is simple — it is hard enough to prevail of the NIH syndrome. Additional concerns over the GPL makes the case for using open source even harder.
Using BSD-licensed open source eliminates those additional concerns.
I'm not comparing GPL'd vs. proprietry software. I'm contrasting GPL with BSD-license — the latter being far less restrictive.
Tell me now, how is Apple's MacOS "at the expense" of a FreeBSD developer or, indeed, of any other "set of people".
Well, yes, of course. You also need the actual hardware too :-)
This is beyond the scope of the discussion, really — all clusters require a fair amount of work to setup and maintain. But we are talking about coding for them here...
Come, come... Certainly, you are not saying, that Apple's FreeBSD-derived MacOS is less marketable, than Novell's Linux-derived SUSE (or whatever)...
Yes, of course — true of any license (and decision). The point is about the rules being too restrictive for some people.
Although such cases likely exist, I don't have to present them here, because I have not spoken of them. The case of Linksys being arm-twisted into releasing their code illustrates my point (not the GGP's apparent interpretation).
That the arm-twisting may have benefited Linksys itself overall (as was credibly suggested by other poster) is not really relevant here — they did not want it, and all of us would've objected to such arm-twisting.
Concerns about such arm-twisting applied to their companies is certainly contributing to managers' fears of Open Source. Justifiably so.
GPL is more of legal incentive, than an economic one... Hence the lawyers' worries...
Yep. BSD is not an enforcement tool.
Interesting. So, now I aware of the benefits — in this case. Cool.
I can, of course, but I don't have to. Unlike the poster who dared me to come with an example of something, I simply said, I'm unaware of something (else) — and you informed me...
Well, if that's all it was, why is OpenWRT offered as an example by another responder to my post? Apparently, some work was required to go from a "Linux distro" to "Linksys firmware" — and that work is now available to all because of GPL.
And I'm not saying, it is bad. But it certainly is something, a "PHB" is justified to be concerned about.
Whether Novell was right or wrong, the truth remains — they had GPL-related troubles (and may have them again). Had they used BSD-licensed wares, they wouldn't have had these troubles. End of story.
Do a Google search will ya?
How about Cisco for example, uhm? Or Linksys:
Now, you could say, the open-sourced firmware was never proprietary to begin with somehow, but that's just semantics — clearly, Linksys thought of it as proprietary and weren't planning to release the sources until the outside pressure made them do it. I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point.
Now that I've successfully responded to your dare, what will you do? If you are a female, you can scratch my back for 5 minutes. If you are a male, you can take out my garbage — once, this Monday. Make your pick.
And for good reason. Just listening to all the talk on whether or not Novell is violating GPL (perhaps by simply partnering with another vendor - Microsoft) should make a lawyer's skin crawl...
If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption.
So, GPL was used to wrestle a few vendors into releasing their own code. And what? Who has looked into that code or used it for anything else? And how many other vendors have (foolishly) decided to avoid "open source" and come up with their own (usually inferior) re-inventions of the wheel, because of that?
It is hard enough to use an outside solution because of the NIH syndrome. Restrictive licenses exacerbate the problem...
The amount of stuff being produced these days for a consumer would easily overwhelm a consumer with even above-average patience and attention span. This is true in not just music, but in many other sectors/industries (cars, home electronics are other examples).
So, somebody needs to be the "gatekeepers" — we are happy to employ them to avoid missing on the good new stuff while not spending all our time weeding out the bad new stuff. The question is only, who should that be.
In medicines, which we deemed to be too important, we have FDA — a government agency. In everything else there are competing outlets, some of them commercial (think CNet), some not (think Consumer Reports).
The following is a simple truism, but it is needed to counter the article's implicit disapproval: Apple got there, because consumers of music like the work, Apple's experts are doing.
Maybe, it is the dissatisfaction with radio jockeys (think "Payola"), or with MTV, who, presumably, are losing their music gatekeeping role to Apple — I don't know. But should Apple become thought of as abusive of its position, people will switch to others — competition, as is often said, is only a click away.
Intel's compiler (icc), available for Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD extends OpenMP to clusters.
You can build your OpenMP code and it will run on clusters automatically. Intel's additional pragmas allow you to control, which things you want parallelized over multiple machines vs. multiple CPUs (the former being fairly expensive to setup and keep in sync).
I've also seen messages on gcc's mailing list, that talk about extending gcc's OpenMP implementation (moved from GOMP to mainstream in gcc-4.2) to clusters the same way.
Nothing in OpenMP prevents a particular implementation from offering multi-machine parallelization. Intel's is just the first compiler to get there...
The beauty of it all is that OpenMP is just compiler pragmas — you can always build the same code with them off (or with a non-supporting compiler), and it will still run serially.
Why do they exclude commercial uses, while allowing political? Personally, I prefer merchants to politicians...
Remember the "No Call List"? Businesses must check it, but politicians don't have to (and their automatic calls are getting increasingly annoying with each elections). At the time, the discrepancy was explained by politicians crafting the exceptions for themselves...
But why is C-SPAN doing it?
The whole thread is about utilitarian approach ("immigration is beneficial" vs. "no it is not") being wrong. He could debate the Human Rights approach I put forward, or he could debate my rejection of the utilitarian, but instead he chose to argue, that it is not beneficial — it is irrelevant... Even if it were detrimental, Human Rights trump those considerations.
No, a Right does not have to be recognized everywhere to be valid. It may be legal in Tututustan to own slaves, for example. That would not deprive Tututustanis from Right To Liberty, and will not make it legal to hold them as slaves.
In other words, you don't have any statistics to back up your claims. As suspected...
Yes, it is Ok with me, because I disagree with the particular law. Violating a law is not in itself wrong — what we disapprove is doing whatever act is prohibited, whether it is illegal or not. There need not be a law against murder for me to disapprove of murderers, for example. On the other hand, no amount of laws against illegal immigration will make me disapprove of those, who break them, simply for breaking them.
For another illustration, I remind you, that Rosa Park's famous act was also illegal at the time...
Well, to me, the Declaration of Independence is a very real document, for example. And that's where the Right to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness are described as Self-Evidently unalienable.
No, these rights can not be alienated from any Man (or Woman, or Hermaphrodite) — according to our own founding document, everyone has them, and always had. Everyone is endowed with them by his Creator. And before you say something about "American citizens only", let me remind you, that Declaration of Independence predates founding of the Constitution by several years and the section I am referring to is perfectly Universal.
Wrong analogy. You can't take my property. But you can buy a house next to me (if you can afford it) and cook the same things for breakfast, if you want to.
You are arguing with way too much passion and too little reason. I don't think, I'll be following-up to you again...
And the source of your statistics is?..
And before that we had Italian Mafia, for example (think "Godfather"). And Irish Mob (Think "Departed"). And Jewish criminals (Think "Once upon a time in America"). And we still have those crimes.
But what are those Mexicans "getting busted by the thousands" for? If their only/main offense is getting here "illegally", then you are exhibiting exactly the circular (thus wrong) argument I described...
And why is an American-born worker entitled to better pay, than a Honduran? By birth right, uhm? That's exactly the "right", on which the King tried to base his sovereignty over us...
It is their Human Right to do so... Of the self-evident kind...
Current, really? Ever heard of Little Italy? Or Chinatown? most big cities in America have ethnic neighborhoods and had them for decades.
This last 4th of July, a group of Italian teenagers in our (heavily Italian) neighborhood was parading with an Italian flag. Why? Because Italy won some soccer match on that day. Yes, a foreign flag in America — on our nation's greatest holiday (during the fireworks, in fact).
Today's immigrants are neither better nor worse then before. The (benign) ties to mother countries, which seem to annoy "real" Americans, are explained simply by better and cheaper communications and transportation.
Yours is a non-argument — you should've kept it in the junk pile...
You are still debating the utilitarian argument, which is wrong... Your argument is wrong in itself too, of course — nobody owes you a living, no matter how much you invested in yourself. But that's irrelevant to my original point: Freedom of Migration is just as unalienable as all other means of Pursuing Happiness.
Which part of the "Right, which your own ancestors took for granted" was so hard for you to understand?
Unless you are a pure Native American, your own Irish/Jewish/Italian/German/Dutch/etc. [great-...-]grand-parents chose to come here instead of fixing "their own damn countries". But today's Mexican/Chinese/Ukrainian/Guatemalan/Vietnamese/et c. can not?
This part has been explained in the very first news article on the subject. You want to wear diapers, when you can not (or don't want to) be interrupted. Apparently, astronauts wear diapers at launch/re-entry. It is a good idea, because you may spend a while strapped to a chair.
She wanted to get over 900 miles as quickly as possible — without stopping to pee — strapped to the driver seat. This part of her act is not at all crazy.
Not wanting to compete against knockoffs seems very sensible. If GPL stands in Novell's way as you describe, it really is a bomb.
How is Novell's desire to remain in full control of Suse (for which it paid a lot of money) "abusive"? And of which community? Community of workalike knockoffs?
One can bang an enemy's head in with a shield, you know... Also, mines are "purely defensive" too — yet there are loud (and sound) arguments for banning some of them...
Instead of arguing, whether immigrants are useful or detrimental overall, the right argument is based on Human Rights. I simply don't understand, how an American (except, perhaps, the Native Americans) can sleep at night rejecting the right to move to this country to someone else.
The same right his/her ancestors took for granted...
Oh, a common defense goes, my ancestors arrived legally. BS. If today's laws were the same as they were before and during the Ellis Island era, all of today's immigrants would've been legal too.
"Oh, but they are criminals," — goes another. No they are not — the only offense, most of them have committed is only violating the laws against immigration. The circular argument boils down to:
Frankly, I hold the following truth Self-Evident:
The need to keep out (real) criminals et al. is of no more consequence to the above statement, than the ban on yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is to the Freedom of Speech.
No, it is not a defensive weapon. Just as this very case is showing, a business (Novell) can adapt GPL-licensed software (Suse) and then find itself limited in their choice of other partners (Microsoft). GPL may be defending GNU-license users against suits by Novell/Microsoft, but it is harming Novell beyond the traditionally understood requirement of "provide the source and you'll be fine".
That no one is suing Novell right now, does not mean, no one will — FSF's leadership may change in a few years... It is not a "time bomb" in that an explosion is not certain. It is a remotely-controlled (by FSF and individual authors) bomb — if they decide, you violated the terms, they could sue — potentially winning, and certainly bringing you a ton of bad publicity...
Why, of course! I'm not disputing the rights of people, communes, and corporations to attach any strings to their works. Just arguing, that the particular bundle of strings called "GPL" is more restrictive than many realize...
While modern BSD-licenses don't carry even the controversial "advertising clause" (which merely required a mention of UC Berkeley), GPL is getting aggressively more restrictive to users helping (like commercial licenses do) the authors instead.
I understand, why someone may pick GPL for their own work, but I don't understand, why Novell did not pick a *BSD Operating System to build upon... Apple made a smarter move.
Could I have the source of these statistics, please? Thank you.
Remember, when the (false) news came out, that OSF/GNU/whatever is going to sue Novell over their deal with Microsoft?
First, when the news was still hot, a number of (Insightful) comments were posted, explaining the issue along the lines of Ms. Tease's argument.
Then, the next day, it was announced, that there are no such plans (for litigation) and the author of the original article was criticized for pulling something out of you-know-where.
Some of the comments (including mine) then reminded, that the "GPL is da bomb", much to the annoyance of GPL fan-boys, who claimed, there is absolutely no danger for a business in mixing it with their own wares.
Here we go the third time around, and GPL really is "da bomb" (no litigation today does not mean, no litigation tomorrow)... Its fans may argue, that it is a weapon in good hands, guarding freedom against proprietary evils — may be. But there is no denying, that it is a weapon (bomb), and that businesses may want to give the idea another thought — or opt for BSD-licensed software instead.