You can't just take software under a GPL license and change to "any license you want".
No, but you can take an LGPL library and link it to a software with any license you want.
They changed license to GPL because people were abusing the LGPL.
Care to elaborate?
The only people who were legitimately upset were other open source (not free) software projects.
Different people have different views on who is "legitimately" upset when he is upset.
I don't see any reason to call this "atrocious" and I don't understand how this gets modded up to 5.
Suppose that you invest lots of effort in a non-GPL (proprietary) software that uses a library that is LGPL. Suddenly, the lib changes to GPL, therefore you cannot use it (new versions anyway) without forking some cash. Some people might legitimately feel screwed. They have the option of sticking to the old version or paying up. In many occasions neither is acceptable.
Forking the client libraries from the last non-GPL version might be a reasonable strategy here, with the option of paying up if it's desirable to have the "official" libs.
I don't use MySQL so I don't care all that much, though. I can just imagine the remorse many a coder-wannabe feels when they tell their bosses that this stuff they were so eagerly pushing is not free anymore.
So these 'atrocious license changes' are like the TV-sales people who when you order you new set of stake knives insist on also giving you a juicer and a can opener for free.
By atrocious license changes I meant the original change of putting client libraries under GPL instead of LGPL.
If your intent is to foster contributions to your project, then aren't you in danger of losing that by allowing more liberal (and potentially, more closed) licenses to be used with your project?
Umm... no. For example, if the client libs were LGPL, any improvements to them would need to be public, but any program using those libs wouldn't need to be. Obviously, even with the new clause, improvements to client libs would need to be public.
Licensing a library as GPL is motivated purely by the prospect of profiting from dual-licensing the library to companies that can't release their code under GPL.
When you start feeling that PHP doesn't have the muscle to do what needs to be done, you might want to check out PSP (Python Server Pages) which is a standard feature of new mod_python, and very much like PHP, with the exception of using a more sophisticated language for scripting.
I know somewhat offtopic... but the article link crashed Moz here for me.. anyone else get that? Ver 1.5
I'll AOL that.
Actually, this is a good opportunity to pinpoint all those Internet Exploder users within the slashdot community and excommunicate them once and for all.
Unix revolves around the idea of simplicity. Microsoft revolves around complex systems, and misguided attempts to hide them with friendly configuration interfaces.
Net result is that you might get something done quickly, but you still won't understand how the thing works. This is not optimal, especially for critical systems.
Nobody understands Windows. I for one don't even want to understand it.
Actually, the NT kernel itself _is_ lean, and contrary to popular Linux fandom theory, the Linux kernel is _not_ lean. The NT kernel supports a bare minimum of functions for interfacing modules, then everything else is written in modules around it, while Linux is monolithic(put a lot of functionality in the kernel itself) and pretty bloated.
This is a myth. NT is not a microkernel, at least not anymore. It was around 3.x (whatever the version number was), but not anymore. IIRC, even the window management functionality is in the kernel now.
And it's not just the kernel - the win32 API is a monster, containing a lot of GUI functionality and whatnot.
Oh well, I guess you should expect nothing less from morons who thought CR/LF, backslash dir seperator and drive letters are good ideas.
Does anyone else see the irony in this person using the term lean in relation to the Linux kernal?
Probably some w2k-running BSD fanboy would. Why do all the Microsoft apologists run BSD instead of Linux? Overcompensating because of their penis-envy, perhaps?
Pretty much any Unix kernel is pretty lean. POSIX is lean, and simple. The OS might resort to some complexity to get performance, but the bloat should stay within tolerable limits if POSIX is all you want to support (instead of all kinds backwards compatibility hacks and DOS 2.11 compatibility).
Am I the only person who thinks improvements should come in the simplification of code rather than adding new features?
Yes. That's why you should switch to Linux. Windows can't just be "simplified", they have created a monster in the form of NT kernel and now they need to deal with it. Switch to a lean, mean POSIX kernel.
We should boycott EV1Servers for contributing to the SCO legal fund.
Indeed. Show that sponsoring the terrorists is not tolerated.
No doubt Darl et. al will bring this up as an example of how the Linux Community (tm) attacks everyone that deals with them, but hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
Show the world that SCO is a disease that infects everyone that touches it.
Bring out the torches!
BTW, I hope nobody is moronic enough to DDOS them. It's a losing strategy. Boycott is much better.
(Obviously these guys could also be out friends, and this might be a scheme to get to SCO, perhaps for selling what they don't own or whatever, but that seems rather far-fetched).
I really find it ironic how often groups of people get attacked on Slashdot and called "zealots" as if their ideas were worthless and wrong simply because you can't understand their reasoning.
Relax, man - the term 'zealot' was not intended to be offensive. I think the the significance of the word has been watered down quite a bit. We're all zealots in some ways, and there's nothing wrong with it. "Gentoo zealot" is kinda running joke around here.
As someone said, life is too short to not be passionate about something.
I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.
Considering the blazing performance of SPARC chips, it might have completed the compilation process by the time Sarge is released. So you might as well wait for sarge.
Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration?
I think these days pretty much all distros are equally good dual-booters. If you have grub, and/boot is big enough to hold the kernel, you can boot pretty much anything.
As long as you order all the distros *not* to touch your boot config, that is. Install the boot configuration once with a distro you trust, and take advantage of the config with subsequent distros.
as if the Gentoo zealots needed any more encouragement to post.
This is just a way to sidetrack them, so they won't be posting to other threads while this one is active.
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
So, zealots, fire away! I might even be convinced to give this one a try - previous Gentoo experiment was short circuited by unavoidable crash on entering X.
Most OSS developers are very talented (they wouldn't love what they are doing otherwise). They shouldn't have much problems landing a good job.
Or does the old fart indeed think that a guy should found a business on a project they create during their studying days? Does he think that the guy doesn't have what it takes to get a day job, so he should grasp the first straw he can get, i.e. his OSS project.
Getting bundled on a Linux distro is a bigger honor than most of us in OSS will ever get.
I moved from Java to Mono/c# recently and I don't think I'll be going back.
Perhaps not back to Java, but you'll be going to the golf-plated prison of your friends at Redmond after MSFT decides that.NET is popular enough to not need Mono project as advertising anymore, and simply shuts down all the non-MSFT.NET projects by a few well-placed lawsuits.
I guess someone would say that you were asking for it by building your house out of hay.
Heard of OpenOffice/StarOffice? If you haven't I suggest you look it up. You might change you opinion of Sun's contributions to open-source software.
I'm not belittling their contributions. But you do understand that you can't use a contribution as a free pass to do any evil deed you deem necessary for your machiavellian plans, right? Being a good citizen is a lot about being consistent in your non-evil behaviour. Hitler was a jerk, even if he provided employment for quite a few. (godwin's law, anyone?)
Not that Sun is so evil as to deserve being annihilated completely, like SCO. I'd just like to see them bleed a few billion and kick out Scott/whoever devised the SCO scheme. Then Sun could be considered a friend again;-).
companies who like the open source model would easily scare if a preacher starts asking them to open source every product they own.
That's a phenomenally bad analogy. Products for which companies charge (and live on) may not be good candidates for Open Sourcing, Sun holds on to Java just because of Control. They are not selling it.
I still don't see the point of a open source java...
He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community.
I have some trouble understanding this statement. Does Scott lie to lawyers, or us?
My god, should we only read and consider statements that are directly addressed to us? Should we be spoon-fed by statements that are tailored to what we want to hear (not talking about slashdot here, of course;-).
Slashdot Mirror
You can't just take software under a GPL license and change to "any license you want".
No, but you can take an LGPL library and link it to a software with any license you want.
They changed license to GPL because people were abusing the LGPL.
Care to elaborate?
The only people who were legitimately upset were other open source (not free) software projects.
Different people have different views on who is "legitimately" upset when he is upset.
I don't see any reason to call this "atrocious" and I don't understand how this gets modded up to 5.
Suppose that you invest lots of effort in a non-GPL (proprietary) software that uses a library that is LGPL. Suddenly, the lib changes to GPL, therefore you cannot use it (new versions anyway) without forking some cash. Some people might legitimately feel screwed. They have the option of sticking to the old version or paying up. In many occasions neither is acceptable.
Forking the client libraries from the last non-GPL version might be a reasonable strategy here, with the option of paying up if it's desirable to have the "official" libs.
I don't use MySQL so I don't care all that much, though. I can just imagine the remorse many a coder-wannabe feels when they tell their bosses that this stuff they were so eagerly pushing is not free anymore.
So these 'atrocious license changes' are like the TV-sales people who when you order you new set of stake knives insist on also giving you a juicer and a can opener for free.
By atrocious license changes I meant the original change of putting client libraries under GPL instead of LGPL.
If your intent is to foster contributions to your project, then aren't you in danger of losing that by allowing more liberal (and potentially, more closed) licenses to be used with your project?
Umm... no. For example, if the client libs were LGPL, any improvements to them would need to be public, but any program using those libs wouldn't need to be. Obviously, even with the new clause, improvements to client libs would need to be public.
Licensing a library as GPL is motivated purely by the prospect of profiting from dual-licensing the library to companies that can't release their code under GPL.
When you start feeling that PHP doesn't have the muscle to do what needs to be done, you might want to check out PSP (Python Server Pages) which is a standard feature of new mod_python, and very much like PHP, with the exception of using a more sophisticated language for scripting.
An article with example code can be read here
Why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of their atrocious license changes? Or does everyone insist to keep on using the old version?
Postgresql is there, and is as free as can be.
BTW, why can't people just fork the old version of MySQL and use any license they want? Lack of skills?
Look at the size of that thing!
I know somewhat offtopic... but the article link crashed Moz here for me.. anyone else get that? Ver 1.5
I'll AOL that.
Actually, this is a good opportunity to pinpoint all those Internet Exploder users within the slashdot community and excommunicate them once and for all.
Unix revolves around the idea of simplicity. Microsoft revolves around complex systems, and misguided attempts to hide them with friendly configuration interfaces.
Net result is that you might get something done quickly, but you still won't understand how the thing works. This is not optimal, especially for critical systems.
Nobody understands Windows. I for one don't even want to understand it.
I hope someone can mount a counter-suit on behalf of the Linux community, and somehow defeat the MSFT legal juggernaut.
That won't happen during Bush administration, for sure.
Actually, the NT kernel itself _is_ lean, and contrary to popular Linux fandom theory, the Linux kernel is _not_ lean. The NT kernel supports a bare minimum of functions for interfacing modules, then everything else is written in modules around it, while Linux is monolithic(put a lot of functionality in the kernel itself) and pretty bloated.
This is a myth. NT is not a microkernel, at least not anymore. It was around 3.x (whatever the version number was), but not anymore. IIRC, even the window management functionality is in the kernel now.
And it's not just the kernel - the win32 API is a monster, containing a lot of GUI functionality and whatnot.
Oh well, I guess you should expect nothing less from morons who thought CR/LF, backslash dir seperator and drive letters are good ideas.
Does anyone else see the irony in this person using the term lean in relation to the Linux kernal?
Probably some w2k-running BSD fanboy would. Why do all the Microsoft apologists run BSD instead of Linux? Overcompensating because of their penis-envy, perhaps?
Pretty much any Unix kernel is pretty lean. POSIX is lean, and simple. The OS might resort to some complexity to get performance, but the bloat should stay within tolerable limits if POSIX is all you want to support (instead of all kinds backwards compatibility hacks and DOS 2.11 compatibility).
Is MS in bed with hardware manufacturers?
MS is in bed with almost everyone, in the sense that almost everybody is taking it up the tailpipe from Bill & Friends. And many don't seem to mind.
Am I the only person who thinks improvements should come in the simplification of code rather than adding new features?
Yes. That's why you should switch to Linux. Windows can't just be "simplified", they have created a monster in the form of NT kernel and now they need to deal with it. Switch to a lean, mean POSIX kernel.
Check this out.
Shit is really going to hit the fan for SCO.
We should boycott EV1Servers for contributing to the SCO legal fund.
Indeed. Show that sponsoring the terrorists is not tolerated.
No doubt Darl et. al will bring this up as an example of how the Linux Community (tm) attacks everyone that deals with them, but hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
Show the world that SCO is a disease that infects everyone that touches it.
Bring out the torches!
BTW, I hope nobody is moronic enough to DDOS them. It's a losing strategy. Boycott is much better.
(Obviously these guys could also be out friends, and this might be a scheme to get to SCO, perhaps for selling what they don't own or whatever, but that seems rather far-fetched).
I really find it ironic how often groups of people get attacked on Slashdot and called "zealots" as if their ideas were worthless and wrong simply because you can't understand their reasoning.
Relax, man - the term 'zealot' was not intended to be offensive. I think the the significance of the word has been watered down quite a bit. We're all zealots in some ways, and there's nothing wrong with it. "Gentoo zealot" is kinda running joke around here.
As someone said, life is too short to not be passionate about something.
I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.
Considering the blazing performance of SPARC chips, it might have completed the compilation process by the time Sarge is released. So you might as well wait for sarge.
Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration?
/boot is big enough to hold the kernel, you can boot pretty much anything.
I think these days pretty much all distros are equally good dual-booters. If you have grub, and
As long as you order all the distros *not* to touch your boot config, that is. Install the boot configuration once with a distro you trust, and take advantage of the config with subsequent distros.
as if the Gentoo zealots needed any more encouragement to post.
This is just a way to sidetrack them, so they won't be posting to other threads while this one is active.
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
So, zealots, fire away! I might even be convinced to give this one a try - previous Gentoo experiment was short circuited by unavoidable crash on entering X.
What if a given person already has a job?
Most OSS developers are very talented (they wouldn't love what they are doing otherwise). They shouldn't have much problems landing a good job.
Or does the old fart indeed think that a guy should found a business on a project they create during their studying days? Does he think that the guy doesn't have what it takes to get a day job, so he should grasp the first straw he can get, i.e. his OSS project.
Getting bundled on a Linux distro is a bigger honor than most of us in OSS will ever get.
It appears they will be changing the name to "Phantom".
"Lothar" also got some random votes.
I moved from Java to Mono/c# recently and I don't think I'll be going back.
.NET is popular enough to not need Mono project as advertising anymore, and simply shuts down all the non-MSFT .NET projects by a few well-placed lawsuits.
Perhaps not back to Java, but you'll be going to the golf-plated prison of your friends at Redmond after MSFT decides that
I guess someone would say that you were asking for it by building your house out of hay.
Heard of OpenOffice/StarOffice? If you haven't I suggest you look it up. You might change you opinion of Sun's contributions to open-source software.
;-).
I'm not belittling their contributions. But you do understand that you can't use a contribution as a free pass to do any evil deed you deem necessary for your machiavellian plans, right? Being a good citizen is a lot about being consistent in your non-evil behaviour. Hitler was a jerk, even if he provided employment for quite a few. (godwin's law, anyone?)
Not that Sun is so evil as to deserve being annihilated completely, like SCO. I'd just like to see them bleed a few billion and kick out Scott/whoever devised the SCO scheme. Then Sun could be considered a friend again
companies who like the open source model would easily scare if a preacher starts asking them to open source every product they own.
7 25 6&mode=thread&tid=185
That's a phenomenally bad analogy. Products for which companies charge (and live on) may not be good candidates for Open Sourcing, Sun holds on to Java just because of Control. They are not selling it.
I still don't see the point of a open source java...
Read
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/13/155
He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community.
;-).
I have some trouble understanding this statement. Does Scott lie to lawyers, or us?
My god, should we only read and consider statements that are directly addressed to us? Should we be spoon-fed by statements that are tailored to what we want to hear (not talking about slashdot here, of course