It's my understanding that the skycranes are only available on lease. They come complete with pilots and a maintenance team. The NSW RFS has considered getting one on permanent lease and then sub-leasing it outside the fire season. However, it generally makes sense to have them going North and South with the summer.
Sorry, no references, this is from fireground gossip.
By the time generation ships are technologically possible, I rather suspect that they will be regarded as morally impossible. While there's always an element of no-choice in where you start out in life, generation ships essentailly enslave future generations to their ancestors' preoccupations.
If the descendants could turn the ship around, they might just decide to come back and bomb into oblivion the smug bastards who tried to railroad them.
I'm not familiar with the US model of church and state separation. Do US cities forbid religious parades on the grounds that public roads are maintained and operated by the government? Or is there some subtle legal difference between common roads and a common fibre optic network? Or is this, perchance, just a bit of puffed smoke?
It's too early for this, since you have at least a couple of years to go. But make sure that they have friends who feel welcome in your house. And that your child feels comfortable visiting his/her friends.
You can't make sure that they have a variety of friends with a variety of interests and a variety of social backgrounds, since they will pick their own friends. But you can encourage it. Living in a small country town or a proper city neighbourhood, rather than a suburb, helps here.
In doing so, you will have given up a considerable amount of influence over your child as far as details go. But, with a bit of luck, you will end up with someone who is confident, (age appropriate) fearless and willing to have a go at things. You will also, with a bit of luck again, get someone who, when they get hurt or have a setback, will pick themselves up off the floor and carry on. In my opinion, that's worth a lot more than being able to read at three.
You also need to make sure that you don't get bent out of shape by the idea that your child is off visiting someone else and you don't really know what they are doing. Sure, sometimes they will send time eating junk food and watching TV. But moderation in all things. In any case, your actual behaviour will count most of all.
(Take with an appropriate grain of salt. I'm still working on this, since my kids are 4 and 6.)
Surely a test is supposed to test if the students understood something. The best way of doing this is to give marks for showing the working to the problem as well as (or instead of) for getting the right answer.
After that, who cares if they use calculators or not. In fact, I'd prefer it, since it gives them a chance to double check their answer and correct their process. A good habit to get into, anyway.
1984 isn't anti-communist propaganda. It's anti-totalitarian propaganda, in part derived from his experiences at the BBC during WWII.
In his writings, such as The Prevention of Literature or Revising History, Orwell is pretty clear about the difficulties freedom of speech and thought go through in an atmosphere of perpetual war, even in societies claiming the banner of liberalism. Sure, Ingsoc is "English Socialism", but that's just a convienience; it could just as well be Ingcap. In the essays above, Orwell points out press barons and film magnates as immediate enemys of truth.
Only do a postgraduate degree if you have a passion for the subject matter. If you do have that passion, you'll have a great time, a really interesting life and meet lots of clever, deranged and interesting people.
You will also never be rich -- unless you are extremely lucky.
But that is a judgement call on your part. It is, however, worth remembering that "quality of life" and "standard of living" are not equivalent.
At least with Open Source Software you CAN maintain it if necessary.
Sort of... kind of...
There comes a point where, particularly without design documentation, the bar is raised so high that the effort involved in maintaining something is more than that involved in moving to a new product.
There's a scaling problem here. What works
with small, simple direct programs doesn't
work with large, complex or indirect programs.
And some OSS code is simply completely undocumented, not even a comment -- apart from the licence.
Something I discovered wandering through the XFree86 XKB code.
Kruschev had the nukes in Cuba. He had the will to use them. If he believed he could have threatened and attacked with inpunity the record of history strongly indicates that he would have.
For extra points, what does Kruschev's comment "Let them feel what it is like to have a knife at their throats" mean?[*] And what does
Izmir, Turkey have to do with it?
Mind you, I'm not sure on how this maps onto
the current debate. The obvious interpretation,
to me, is that the open-source movement is like
the Soviet Union, threatened by forward intermediate range missiles.
But, in that case, getting an open-source
portfolio of patents looks like installing
missiles in Cuba.
That led to a tactical victory (the US missiles
were removed from Turkey) but a strategic
defeat for the Soviet Union.
[*] Unfortunately, no web reference. This was quoted by a participant in a TV program on the crisis.
I'm a Python programmer, and I do know Java and I have developed in a J2EE environment and I have written EJBs and I have also been writing Perl for the last 15 years. And I have been a professional C developer and I know C++, Objective C, Fortran, Cobol, Ruby, Haskell, sed, awk, Korn shell, Bourne shell, DTKsh, C shell. I've written in just about every language you can name.
I'm a programmer. Period.
With the exception of DTKsh, Objective C and Ruby, I've also programmed in all those languages and Smalltalk, Prolog, Lisp, Basic-Plus, various forms of assembly and some I've forgotten. I've also designed and built my own languages. I've taught programming language courses at university.
And you know what? I think Python is the best.
And you know what? I think Python's an OK-ish language.
I'd use Python for stuff where perl is too deranged and primitive to handle the complexity, it's not a large enough project to require the support of Java and where I need a slimmer, more direct environment than Smalltalk. And where I can't show how infinitely superior I am to sad little wannabes like Paul Graham, who argue over Python and Java, by using Prolog.
I know that armies always prepare for the last war, but this is getting faintly ridiculous.
Large quantities of heavy metal doesn't always achieve the objective. And the US has a consitent record of losing the lot by calling in an airstrike when a cup of tea would have done a better job. This is just more of the same.
If you have a look at what nations with a successful peacekeeping and low intensity warfare record (eg. Finland, the UK and Australia) do, they make sure that they don't look like robocop. They take their helmets off, so that they are regarded as human beings. They're polite (well, politeish). They don't rely on sensor systems; they talk to people.
All the technology in the world won't overcome cluelessness and myopia.
Pick three files in/etc ending in.conf, say/etc/nsswitch.conf,/etc/xinetd.conf and/etc/esd.conf, and take a look at them.
Apart from using '#' as a comment indicator (and I'm not sure about esd.conf) is there any commonality between them at all? Each has its own syntax and conventions and to work out what is going on you need to find and examine the documentation in detail. Whoops: "man esd.conf -- No manual entry for esd.conf". There are 313 files ending in.conf on my system[*], all different in some way or other.
The end result is a sort of fragility through overload. In theory, it's possible to wade though all this stuff and work out what's happening and what's going wrong. And this is what professional sysadmins are paid to do and hobbyists do for fun. For everybody else, things just take too much time and stay broken. Things stay broken, not because the people using the computers are stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but because they have better things to do with their time than pay the initiation cost to join the geek brotherhood. James Joyce may have demanded that his readers spend the rest of their lives studying his work, but I don't think that helped him, either.
This chaos is because whoever wrote the various programs that use these files simply ran up a configuration file suitable for that program using whatever conventions that seemed like a good idea at the time. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone.) It's an inherent part of the open-source do-it-yourself mentality, exacerbated by programs which are written to solve private problems and gradually become available to a wider audience.
But it's also why any number of tacked-on GUI front-ends will never provide a halfway decent configuration interface in *nix-land. It's not possible to sensibly cope with the diversity in a complete, coherent way. (And that's ignoring 'configuration' that is actually a Turing-equivalent program.)
Looked at from another angle, this is the same problem that confronts any user of OSS with GUIs. Everything is built to act in a locally consistent fashion, with no global coherence. (Eg. running GNOME, KDE and OpenOffice programs simultaneously.)
The obvious solution to all this is vigourously imposed and followed standards for data, metadata and behaviour, so that both users and programs can work with something new. (Although it does cause the dread monoculture security problem; *nix is partially protected from worms simply by the difficulty in finding something consistent to break open.)
But I don't think that its culturally possible within the OSS movement. It requires a considerable amount of discipline to carefully read up and follow configuration standards for a program that just (for now) prints "Hello World". It also places the cost of entry on the programmer, not on the user, and its hard for most people to pay an up-front cost now so that someone else doesn't have to pay a deferred cost. It may be something that "big ticket" OSS projects, such as Apache, are able to impose, however, and it may be something that turns a project into a big ticket project.
[*] Yes, so I used, "locate.conf | grep '.conf$' | wc"
not caring about proper memory management and usage leads to lazy programming.
Laziness is in the eye of the beholder.
Not caring about memory management leads to
concentrating on other things.
Such as well-designed, correct, understandable, maintainable code.
This is often much more important than
resource usage when you have a complex application domain that changes all the time,
such as finance or medicine to worry about.
Memory is cheaper than good analysis and design.
In addition, you get to practise computer science
101: write the code properly, then find out what
the resource limitations are, then optimise if you
have to.
Hence the popularity of higher-level languages
for application programming.
If you use a virtual machine environment, such
as Java or (shudder!) perl for application
programs then you are freed to concentrate on
the design and correctness of the application.
Plus you get the benefit of improvements in
memory management algorithms, rather than having
to re-invent the wheel every time.
any improvement you make now will help you in the long run, especially if you're always adding things to older code.
The problem with "improvements" is that
they are often at the expense of coherency.
For many programs, concentrating on system
details, such as memory management, is more
likely to result in obscure, fragile code
that is almost impossible to add to.
If your architecture starts to change, then all
those "improvements" are going to be a nightmare.
Which is not to say that resource management
isn't important in some areas; particularly
system-level and small, multiple-use software.
But these areas don't make up the whole world.
I'm afraid you can't rewind the clock and
relicence ot all under a different licence
that's more to your liking.
I can't, but the FSF can.
Most GPL'd code contains the phrase... either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version...
And, although there's been some difficulty
with that clause in the past (eg. the glib
controversy), it's something can be done
if the FSF so chooses.
Because you can never make a license that says "no additional restrictions allowed except when they are harmless".
No, but you can offer specific exemptions.
Say, for example, allowing the display of
additional copyright notices or authorship
statements.
Or, for example, by allowing linking with
other varieties of public domain software;
something that the LGPL allows, amongst other
things.
Since the GPL already has specific restrictions
(eg. on patents) there's nothing obvious
to prevent specific permissions.
And if you do allow additional restrictions
where does that leave the "Free" in "Free Software"?
The XFree86 license is considerably less
restrictive than the GPL.
It requires a bit of a stretch (and a very
specialised use of the word "Free") to say
that linking such code with the GPL makes it
less "Free".
... and the GPL doesn't allow any additional
restrictions (however harmless they may seem) to
be added. Hence, an incompatibility between that
licence and the GPL.
So the problem would appear to be with the GPL,
then, not with the new XFree86 license.
There are plain, practical issues,
such as the difficulty in updating
documentation in time.
And, certainly, the GPL gets a certain level of
privilege by being one of the most common
open-source licenses -- hedge, since I don't know
if it is the most common.
But, pace Microsoft, I don't see why being common
automatically means that should be
"my way or the highway".
This is going to be a bit of a problem for people running things like majordomo and so on from their home linux boxes.
If things have been set up to use the ISP's mail servers as relays, which you might do to save on bandwidth, it's going to get sticky. (Or does one message with a trillion addresses count as one message?)
So it sounds like Geronimo should be indemnifying their users from legal action, not JBoss. Why would a JBoss customer need legal protection?
Possibly because JBoss may have shot itself
in the foot.
At least some of the JBoss code that Geronimo
allegedly copied (see next paragraph) seems
to have been derived from code under the
Apache license.
See the
comments by Ceki Gulcu, the author of log4j.
One reason for Geronimo not offering
protection is that Geronimo is an "incubator"
project, so there probably aren't any
clients as such who need indemnification.
It's also not at all clear that Geronimo
has copied JBoss code.
TheServerSide has an extended
discussion on the
subject and the
Geronimo developer's list has
some forensic discussion on it.
All of this can be fixed up, of course, if the
children play nice.
But sending a lawyer's letter isn't a promising
start.
There's also enough irony in the situation to
start up a smelter.
Large companies -- as in Honest-to-God
Enterprises, not start-ups -- tend to use
NDAs for the simple reason that they
want (and need) to control the pace and
measure of announcements to the outside world.
They obviously don't want to have something
announced on them that will subsequently fail
and leave them with egg on their face
or interfere with a marketing strategy.
They also tend to have a complex web
of connections with other entities.
Under the circumstances, NDAs are a natural
approach.
Having said that, I have seen two large
organisations work themselves into NDA deadlock
over something that both of them agreed would
be mutually beneficial.
In large organisations, NDAs also place an
extra cost on any simple transaction, as
the legal departments go to work.
It occurs to me that start-ups use NDAs as a
sort of mixture of puffery ("see, we're big,
too") and cargo-cult behaviour ("the big
companies use this, so if we behave
like them...").
So, in other words, if I don't put a big notice on my e-commerce website saying "Don't even think about spamming these contact e-mails," I can expect to have to muck out the mailbox three times a day, as usual. Oh, wait; per the law, it will all be relevant to my business, and therefore legitimate.
Sure. Provided that all of those messages are
relevant to your e-commerce site.
What do you supply that requires such a big penis?
Note the "the relevant electronic account-holder is taken, for the purposes of this Act, to have consented to the sending of commercial electronic messages to that address, so long as the messages are relevant to:" (my emphasis)
It's also worth noting that this raises the economic
bar to an intreresting height.
You can't just scrape web pages for addresses,
you also have to verify that there isn't a
"no junk mail" sign on the page and determine
what kind of messages you can legitimately send
to that address.
At the moment, that will require an expensive
human.
Hmmm. Maybe RDF and the semantic web aren't
such a good idea, after all.
Practically, this clause allows someone with a
legitimate product or service to sell
that is relevant to a company to come calling.
This just might apply to InkJet
refills, but I don't think it applies to most spam.
I can't speak for anyone else, but telemarketing
isn't that much of a bother to me (an Aussie).
We get about one call a month, if that.
The "No junk mail" sign on the mailbox means
that I don't get piles of useless paper in my
mailbox; the postie doesn't deliver obvious
junk mail and folks delivering advertising by
hand respect it.
Spam I get by the bucketload, even with
spamassasin running.
A lot of the spam comes (apparently) from
the US, which is sourly amusing when it's for something
where the transportation costs would dwarf the
value of what's offered.
That is an indication of why spam is such a problem.
Telephone and dead tree marketing are
self-limiting and necessarily local, since the marketer
cops some expenses.
I can be spammed by any twit in the world at
minimal cost.
It does give me a sense of the true
horror of what saturation telemarketing must be
like, though.
And why a do-not-call list would be a good idea
where phone marketing is a major annoyance.
Personally, spam is a bigger problem than
any other form of direct marketing.
Generalising wildly to the rest of Australia,
this would seem to be the sense of the bill.
The bill itself covers any electronc
message to any electronic address,
including telephone numbers, with specific
exclusions.
It also prohibits the harvesting of addresses.
It's pretty clearly aimed straight at low-cost,
high-volume automated annoyances.
If other forms of direct marketing approach
the same level of annoyance, they can be
dealt with seperately.
If the Direct Marketing Association likes it, then something is wrong. Odds are, there's a weasel clause that basically defines spam as "that which the DMA doesn't do".
Kind of true.
Straight telephone use is explicitly excluded (section 5.5).
Section 6.7 also allows other messages to be
administratively excluded -- which is perfectly
sensible, as it allows oddities to be fixed up
without resort to a new law.
However, this is a bill that outlaws
spam,
not all kinds of direct marketing.
Why wouldn't the DMA be delighted?
It solves a major public relations headache
for them.
Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
Not until Linux (and Unix in general) becomes
truely fanatical about a quality user interface.
This includes such things as consistently
protecting the user against dumb accidents
(no more unrecoverable 'rm *.o' errors)
a really consistent interface (no more
Athena/KDE/GTK/... toolkits as the whim takes
the programmer) and, generally, not just
papering over the cracks but ensuring that the UI
is really seamless.
But I'm not sure that this is even possible in
open-source land.
The natural inclination is to do things your
way, rather than the way laid down by the
Great Committee.
This is great in the sense that it has made
amateur programming fun again. "Amateur" in the
sense of for fun, rather than for profit; no
implications on the quality of the software are
intended.
But it's not so great in that the user has to
come to terms with the myriad incoherent ways
of doing things that make up each work of art
that is an open-source program.
Linux (at the moment) is wonderful for the
community of
Morlocks
(of which I am a member).
But Apple, if it wasn't so expensive, is still
the only company serious about being "the computer
for everybody else".
From IBM's own mouth, they make over 80% of
their revenues on custom integrations and
support, which means that GPL software is a
good choice from their perspective.
Proprietary software wouldn't make them much
more money.
There's probably at least a little wariness
of the licensing mess they could get into doing
integrations.
A lot of integration software is container-based,
like an application server; you deploy your
program into another piece of software that
provides application services.
Since the
GPL FAQ regards plugins
as covered by the GPL, it doesn't take much of
a stretch to regard software deployed in a GPL'd
container as also covered by the GPL.
(The
JBoss
application server is LGPL'd, I would assume
for that very reason.)
Given that, as a private company specialising
in a particular vertical domain such as
medicine or finance, you may wish to retain
the domain knowledge encoded in your software
for later resale, having it GPL'd by default
may not thrill you.
All of this is not an argument not to use
open-source or GPL'd software by default, of
course. But it does suggest that integration
and vertical application vendors might be more
than a little wary of the full GPL where it
applies to container-like software.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that the skycranes are only available on lease. They come complete with pilots and a maintenance team. The NSW RFS has considered getting one on permanent lease and then sub-leasing it outside the fire season. However, it generally makes sense to have them going North and South with the summer.
Sorry, no references, this is from fireground gossip.
By the time generation ships are technologically possible, I rather suspect that they will be regarded as morally impossible. While there's always an element of no-choice in where you start out in life, generation ships essentailly enslave future generations to their ancestors' preoccupations.
If the descendants could turn the ship around, they might just decide to come back and bomb into oblivion the smug bastards who tried to railroad them.
I'm not familiar with the US model of church and state separation. Do US cities forbid religious parades on the grounds that public roads are maintained and operated by the government? Or is there some subtle legal difference between common roads and a common fibre optic network? Or is this, perchance, just a bit of puffed smoke?
It's too early for this, since you have at least a couple of years to go. But make sure that they have friends who feel welcome in your house. And that your child feels comfortable visiting his/her friends.
You can't make sure that they have a variety of friends with a variety of interests and a variety of social backgrounds, since they will pick their own friends. But you can encourage it. Living in a small country town or a proper city neighbourhood, rather than a suburb, helps here.
In doing so, you will have given up a considerable amount of influence over your child as far as details go. But, with a bit of luck, you will end up with someone who is confident, (age appropriate) fearless and willing to have a go at things. You will also, with a bit of luck again, get someone who, when they get hurt or have a setback, will pick themselves up off the floor and carry on. In my opinion, that's worth a lot more than being able to read at three.
You also need to make sure that you don't get bent out of shape by the idea that your child is off visiting someone else and you don't really know what they are doing. Sure, sometimes they will send time eating junk food and watching TV. But moderation in all things. In any case, your actual behaviour will count most of all.
(Take with an appropriate grain of salt. I'm still working on this, since my kids are 4 and 6.)
Surely a test is supposed to test if the students understood something. The best way of doing this is to give marks for showing the working to the problem as well as (or instead of) for getting the right answer.
After that, who cares if they use calculators or not. In fact, I'd prefer it, since it gives them a chance to double check their answer and correct their process. A good habit to get into, anyway.
1984 isn't anti-communist propaganda. It's anti-totalitarian propaganda, in part derived from his experiences at the BBC during WWII.
...
In his writings, such as The Prevention of Literature or Revising History, Orwell is pretty clear about the difficulties freedom of speech and thought go through in an atmosphere of perpetual war, even in societies claiming the banner of liberalism. Sure, Ingsoc is "English Socialism", but that's just a convienience; it could just as well be Ingcap. In the essays above, Orwell points out press barons and film magnates as immediate enemys of truth.
See http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/ for a collection of his essays.
The relevance of all this to the present day, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader
Only do a postgraduate degree if you have a passion for the subject matter. If you do have that passion, you'll have a great time, a really interesting life and meet lots of clever, deranged and interesting people.
You will also never be rich -- unless you are extremely lucky.
But that is a judgement call on your part. It is, however, worth remembering that "quality of life" and "standard of living" are not equivalent.
Sort of ... kind of ...
There comes a point where, particularly without design documentation, the bar is raised so high that the effort involved in maintaining something is more than that involved in moving to a new product. There's a scaling problem here. What works with small, simple direct programs doesn't work with large, complex or indirect programs.
And some OSS code is simply completely undocumented, not even a comment -- apart from the licence. Something I discovered wandering through the XFree86 XKB code.
See http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/ index.html
for a discussion some of the weaknesses of the open source model when it comes to program comprehension.
For extra points, what does Kruschev's comment "Let them feel what it is like to have a knife at their throats" mean?[*] And what does Izmir, Turkey have to do with it?
Mind you, I'm not sure on how this maps onto the current debate. The obvious interpretation, to me, is that the open-source movement is like the Soviet Union, threatened by forward intermediate range missiles. But, in that case, getting an open-source portfolio of patents looks like installing missiles in Cuba. That led to a tactical victory (the US missiles were removed from Turkey) but a strategic defeat for the Soviet Union.
[*] Unfortunately, no web reference. This was quoted by a participant in a TV program on the crisis.
I'm a programmer. Period.
With the exception of DTKsh, Objective C and Ruby, I've also programmed in all those languages and Smalltalk, Prolog, Lisp, Basic-Plus, various forms of assembly and some I've forgotten. I've also designed and built my own languages. I've taught programming language courses at university.
And you know what? I think Python's an OK-ish language.
I'd use Python for stuff where perl is too deranged and primitive to handle the complexity, it's not a large enough project to require the support of Java and where I need a slimmer, more direct environment than Smalltalk. And where I can't show how infinitely superior I am to sad little wannabes like Paul Graham, who argue over Python and Java, by using Prolog.
I know that armies always prepare for the last war, but this is getting faintly ridiculous.
Large quantities of heavy metal doesn't always achieve the objective. And the US has a consitent record of losing the lot by calling in an airstrike when a cup of tea would have done a better job. This is just more of the same.
If you have a look at what nations with a successful peacekeeping and low intensity warfare record (eg. Finland, the UK and Australia) do, they make sure that they don't look like robocop. They take their helmets off, so that they are regarded as human beings. They're polite (well, politeish). They don't rely on sensor systems; they talk to people.
All the technology in the world won't overcome cluelessness and myopia.
Pick three files in /etc ending in .conf, say /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/xinetd.conf and /etc/esd.conf, and take a look at them.
.conf on my system[*], all different in some way or other.
.conf | grep '.conf$' | wc"
Apart from using '#' as a comment indicator (and I'm not sure about esd.conf) is there any commonality between them at all? Each has its own syntax and conventions and to work out what is going on you need to find and examine the documentation in detail. Whoops: "man esd.conf -- No manual entry for esd.conf". There are 313 files ending in
The end result is a sort of fragility through overload. In theory, it's possible to wade though all this stuff and work out what's happening and what's going wrong. And this is what professional sysadmins are paid to do and hobbyists do for fun. For everybody else, things just take too much time and stay broken. Things stay broken, not because the people using the computers are stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but because they have better things to do with their time than pay the initiation cost to join the geek brotherhood. James Joyce may have demanded that his readers spend the rest of their lives studying his work, but I don't think that helped him, either.
This chaos is because whoever wrote the various programs that use these files simply ran up a configuration file suitable for that program using whatever conventions that seemed like a good idea at the time. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone.) It's an inherent part of the open-source do-it-yourself mentality, exacerbated by programs which are written to solve private problems and gradually become available to a wider audience.
But it's also why any number of tacked-on GUI front-ends will never provide a halfway decent configuration interface in *nix-land. It's not possible to sensibly cope with the diversity in a complete, coherent way. (And that's ignoring 'configuration' that is actually a Turing-equivalent program.)
Looked at from another angle, this is the same problem that confronts any user of OSS with GUIs. Everything is built to act in a locally consistent fashion, with no global coherence. (Eg. running GNOME, KDE and OpenOffice programs simultaneously.)
The obvious solution to all this is vigourously imposed and followed standards for data, metadata and behaviour, so that both users and programs can work with something new. (Although it does cause the dread monoculture security problem; *nix is partially protected from worms simply by the difficulty in finding something consistent to break open.)
But I don't think that its culturally possible within the OSS movement. It requires a considerable amount of discipline to carefully read up and follow configuration standards for a program that just (for now) prints "Hello World". It also places the cost of entry on the programmer, not on the user, and its hard for most people to pay an up-front cost now so that someone else doesn't have to pay a deferred cost. It may be something that "big ticket" OSS projects, such as Apache, are able to impose, however, and it may be something that turns a project into a big ticket project.
[*] Yes, so I used, "locate
Laziness is in the eye of the beholder. Not caring about memory management leads to concentrating on other things. Such as well-designed, correct, understandable, maintainable code. This is often much more important than resource usage when you have a complex application domain that changes all the time, such as finance or medicine to worry about. Memory is cheaper than good analysis and design.
In addition, you get to practise computer science 101: write the code properly, then find out what the resource limitations are, then optimise if you have to.
Hence the popularity of higher-level languages for application programming. If you use a virtual machine environment, such as Java or (shudder!) perl for application programs then you are freed to concentrate on the design and correctness of the application. Plus you get the benefit of improvements in memory management algorithms, rather than having to re-invent the wheel every time.
The problem with "improvements" is that they are often at the expense of coherency. For many programs, concentrating on system details, such as memory management, is more likely to result in obscure, fragile code that is almost impossible to add to. If your architecture starts to change, then all those "improvements" are going to be a nightmare.
Which is not to say that resource management isn't important in some areas; particularly system-level and small, multiple-use software. But these areas don't make up the whole world.
I can't, but the FSF can. Most GPL'd code contains the phrase ... either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version ...
And, although there's been some difficulty
with that clause in the past (eg. the glib
controversy), it's something can be done
if the FSF so chooses.
No, but you can offer specific exemptions. Say, for example, allowing the display of additional copyright notices or authorship statements. Or, for example, by allowing linking with other varieties of public domain software; something that the LGPL allows, amongst other things. Since the GPL already has specific restrictions (eg. on patents) there's nothing obvious to prevent specific permissions.
The XFree86 license is considerably less restrictive than the GPL. It requires a bit of a stretch (and a very specialised use of the word "Free") to say that linking such code with the GPL makes it less "Free".
So the problem would appear to be with the GPL, then, not with the new XFree86 license.
There are plain, practical issues, such as the difficulty in updating documentation in time.
And, certainly, the GPL gets a certain level of privilege by being one of the most common open-source licenses -- hedge, since I don't know if it is the most common. But, pace Microsoft, I don't see why being common automatically means that should be "my way or the highway".
John Brunner, Shockwave Rider
This is going to be a bit of a problem for people running things like majordomo and so on from
their home linux boxes.
If things have been set up to use the ISP's mail servers as relays, which you might do to save on bandwidth, it's going to get sticky. (Or does one message with a trillion addresses count as one message?)
Possibly because JBoss may have shot itself in the foot.
At least some of the JBoss code that Geronimo allegedly copied (see next paragraph) seems to have been derived from code under the Apache license. See the comments by Ceki Gulcu, the author of log4j.
One reason for Geronimo not offering protection is that Geronimo is an "incubator" project, so there probably aren't any clients as such who need indemnification. It's also not at all clear that Geronimo has copied JBoss code. TheServerSide has an extended discussion on the subject and the Geronimo developer's list has some forensic discussion on it.
All of this can be fixed up, of course, if the children play nice. But sending a lawyer's letter isn't a promising start. There's also enough irony in the situation to start up a smelter.
Having said that, I have seen two large organisations work themselves into NDA deadlock over something that both of them agreed would be mutually beneficial. In large organisations, NDAs also place an extra cost on any simple transaction, as the legal departments go to work.
It occurs to me that start-ups use NDAs as a sort of mixture of puffery ("see, we're big, too") and cargo-cult behaviour ("the big companies use this, so if we behave like them ...").
Sure. Provided that all of those messages are relevant to your e-commerce site. What do you supply that requires such a big penis?
Note the "the relevant electronic account-holder is taken, for the purposes of this Act, to have consented to the sending of commercial electronic messages to that address, so long as the messages are relevant to:" (my emphasis)
It's also worth noting that this raises the economic bar to an intreresting height. You can't just scrape web pages for addresses, you also have to verify that there isn't a "no junk mail" sign on the page and determine what kind of messages you can legitimately send to that address. At the moment, that will require an expensive human. Hmmm. Maybe RDF and the semantic web aren't such a good idea, after all.
Practically, this clause allows someone with a legitimate product or service to sell that is relevant to a company to come calling. This just might apply to InkJet refills, but I don't think it applies to most spam.
Spam I get by the bucketload, even with spamassasin running.
A lot of the spam comes (apparently) from the US, which is sourly amusing when it's for something where the transportation costs would dwarf the value of what's offered. That is an indication of why spam is such a problem. Telephone and dead tree marketing are self-limiting and necessarily local, since the marketer cops some expenses. I can be spammed by any twit in the world at minimal cost. It does give me a sense of the true horror of what saturation telemarketing must be like, though. And why a do-not-call list would be a good idea where phone marketing is a major annoyance.
Personally, spam is a bigger problem than any other form of direct marketing. Generalising wildly to the rest of Australia, this would seem to be the sense of the bill.
The bill itself covers any electronc message to any electronic address, including telephone numbers, with specific exclusions. It also prohibits the harvesting of addresses. It's pretty clearly aimed straight at low-cost, high-volume automated annoyances. If other forms of direct marketing approach the same level of annoyance, they can be dealt with seperately.
Kind of true. Straight telephone use is explicitly excluded (section 5.5). Section 6.7 also allows other messages to be administratively excluded -- which is perfectly sensible, as it allows oddities to be fixed up without resort to a new law.
However, this is a bill that outlaws spam, not all kinds of direct marketing. Why wouldn't the DMA be delighted? It solves a major public relations headache for them.
Not until Linux (and Unix in general) becomes truely fanatical about a quality user interface. This includes such things as consistently protecting the user against dumb accidents (no more unrecoverable 'rm * .o' errors)
a really consistent interface (no more
Athena/KDE/GTK/... toolkits as the whim takes
the programmer) and, generally, not just
papering over the cracks but ensuring that the UI
is really seamless.
But I'm not sure that this is even possible in open-source land. The natural inclination is to do things your way, rather than the way laid down by the Great Committee. This is great in the sense that it has made amateur programming fun again. "Amateur" in the sense of for fun, rather than for profit; no implications on the quality of the software are intended. But it's not so great in that the user has to come to terms with the myriad incoherent ways of doing things that make up each work of art that is an open-source program.
Linux (at the moment) is wonderful for the community of Morlocks (of which I am a member). But Apple, if it wasn't so expensive, is still the only company serious about being "the computer for everybody else".
There's probably at least a little wariness of the licensing mess they could get into doing integrations. A lot of integration software is container-based, like an application server; you deploy your program into another piece of software that provides application services.
Since the GPL FAQ regards plugins as covered by the GPL, it doesn't take much of a stretch to regard software deployed in a GPL'd container as also covered by the GPL. (The JBoss application server is LGPL'd, I would assume for that very reason.)
Given that, as a private company specialising in a particular vertical domain such as medicine or finance, you may wish to retain the domain knowledge encoded in your software for later resale, having it GPL'd by default may not thrill you.
All of this is not an argument not to use open-source or GPL'd software by default, of course. But it does suggest that integration and vertical application vendors might be more than a little wary of the full GPL where it applies to container-like software.