In the interview, McBride claimed their were hundreds of thousands of tainted lines and he implied rather directly, that simply excising these portions of code might not be practical or satisfactory. His suggestion involved going back to a 2.2 kernel since most if not all of the identified infringements were made in 2.4.
In the interview, McBride mumbled something about what sounded like a public show and tell session August 17th or 18th. Of course then again, he also said that if anyone wanted to come in and check themselves they were welcome to do so:) Field trip anyone?
McBride was asked about this directly in the interview. His response was a little hazy but basically, he pointed to two arguments.
First he said something about the GPL providing an out, in which I believe he was referencing section 7. This section is about patent/copyright infringement and about how if you can not distribute under the terms of the gpl, then you simply can't distribute. He seemed to be under the impression that SCO was no longer distributing (but I thought they were?)
Second, McBride claimed that federal copyright law (no idea where) specified that you could not accidentally give away your copyright. It is pretty easy to envision a scenario of SCO ip seeping into linux via a third party without SCO knowing, resulting in it's accidental distribution by SCO. Of course, if this clause to copyright does exist, I'd be curious to find out who holds the burden of proof. Considering the scope of the allegations McBride made against Linux and the fact that they distributed their own version of Linux for so many years, it would seem unlikely that the level of infringement SCO indicates would have gone unnoticed for so long (right up until the moment when the company is circling the drain).
most (if not all) businesses that say they have the lowest price in town honor pricematching of local competitors.
Matching the lowest price in town is not the same as having the lowest price in town. If I walk up to Best Buy and say, "give me the lowest price in town for that television," they are going to tell me that if I find a lower price within 30 days, they will refund me the difference but for now I can just pay their price. When they say they have the lowest price in town, not only are they not offering the lowest price in town, but they generally don't even know the lowest price in town. Furthermore, if they do know a competitor offers the same product for a lower price, they are not going to give me that price unless I explicitly ask for it. Here be willful deception.
Me too. My grandfather is arguably the most intelligent person I know. At last count he had 6 or 7 degrees and had written over 20 books. For a number of years, he was near the top in the US department of forestry. He's been given keys to cities. You should see him try to use a computer with one of those new fangled graphical user interfaces.
In reality, what most people generally think of as intelligence has very little to do with an individual's capacity to learn or achieve. More often than not we seem to measure an individual's intelligence, or rather stupidity, based on their ability to not do something that we ourselves know better than.
which is certainly possible -- many parts are quite vague
I agree that many parts of the GPL/LGPL are too vague. Reading through the FAQs there are segments where the people explaining the license admit uncertainty as to what exactly it means and what they are allowing and disallowing. A prime example of this is in the Mere Aggregation section of the FAQ where there's a nice little quote, "What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide.". This portion of the FAQ does give some examples and rough guidelines but ultimately it seems to abdicate the actual decision. We're left with an ambiguous interpretation of an ambiguous license.
We're developers here, we live and die by detailed specifications. We bitch and moan when we don't get them. Why do we permit this level of ambiguity?
disallows you from ever using those licenses with Java unless you somehow manage to avoid using any of the base Java runtime library code?
I believe there is some kind of exemption allowing you to use the libraries and code normally distributed with a compiler or platform without that code having to be gpl or lgpl. So, since the base libraries come with the Java platform, they are ok.
... and pick up your open wireless access point... but is it right for me to even be on your private network at all?
Fine by me, that's why I left the WAP open.
What if you had used WEP and I cracked it and got onto your network
You can passively crack all the WEP signals you want. I don't care, but I would think that cracking the resource AND using it would be some kind of trespass since there was no implied consent. A similar logic would apply to a cordless phone base station.
Please excuse me while I step back into my faraday cage.
On the contrary, I would speculate that resources for the criminal and civil court systems are at some point bound together. There's only so much money and so many lawyers to go around.
I'd rather have no security than snake oil. This looks like it might slow down or stop a certain percentage of RIAA efforts, but I would venture a guess that the efforts the RIAA exerts to find particular sharers would be trivial compared to the actual costs of litigation. In other words, this is probably not going to hinder them that much overall.
Actually, if I were the RIAA, this would be exactly the kind of protection I would want a file sharing network to employ. It is easily defeatable so when they start prosecuting people who thought they were anonymous, it could substantially lower public trust in secure file sharing networks.
Just to reitterate/expand, the courses I'm talking about are one credit hour and are graded pass/fail. We do have a couple programming languages courses, but this is not a course to teach you how to program in language x, rather it is a survey of different aspects of different languages. In other words, we're not talking about core or even remotely important curriculum. Instead this is fluff and filler designed to cater to the more practical needs of students.
You say that teaching proprietary tech is IT not CS, but I say IT is a part of CS. Furthermore, I would not be willing to exclude innovative proprietary technology on the sole basis of it being proprietary.
All are multi-platform, company agnostic and most (all?) have a free compiler and operating system to learn and experiment on./i>
From what I understand, mono, which has nothing to do with microsoft, is coming along nicely. Also, if I'm not mistaken, MS gives a way a free command line compiler. Since I've never used it I'm not sure how free it is. As for having an Operating System to experiment on, the vast majority of Computer Science majors I've known are far far more comfortable with and have greater access to windows. Also, at least at Ohio State, there's a microsoft club that gives away copies of visual studio, and if that fails there's always a copy of the buckeye bundle (which includes Visual Studio for $100). I mean, in the grand scheme of a college education, $100 isn't that much. I've had textbooks cost more than that and those were worth far less. Anyways, we're not talking about mandatory courses.
There's only one place you're going to use 'XYZ'.NET
Would that be Earth? It's got to be one of the most in demand tech skills today.
What's VB have to offer academia besides "you can develop crap real fast."
Isn't that enough? Would you rather learn cobol or fortran?
Well, the stated intention of these 1 credit hour language courses is a mix of resume filler and some niche offerings for various business and science majors. C Sharp, and in particular VB, are widely used and as such are potentially useful things to have on one's resume. Sure it's true that they might not offer some of the innovations of other languages like lisp, but on the other hand, the style of software development used in COM and.NET isn't really taught any other place at OSU.
What is wrong with a university providing access to or even some courses involving proprietary technology? Obviously, there are problems if you are basing your curriculum around a particular vendor or set of vendors, but what is so bad about having small elective courses that use proprietary tech? Ohio State had one credit hour courses in lisp, cobol, fortran, c, c++, java, and unix shell scripting. The advertised purpose of the courses was to give students some additional ammunition to add to their generally skill-free resumes. Why not visual basic and c sharp?
Disclaimer - I was never particularly fond of Djikstra. He seemed to be too wordy and too self important, which is not to say he didn't make some good contributions.
software is so poor in quality nowadays because developers don't really bother to come up with formal proofs of correctness for their programs
Asides from it being perposterous to expect all the developers in the world to write formal proofs for their programs, this statement is at best a wild assumption. He is proposing that the lack of use of a particular (his) potential solution to a problem is the root cause of the problem. Also, I've got to doubt that formal proofs would be worth nearly the tradeoff in terms of time. If you think about it, a program is itself akin to a proof of correctness. If a coder makes a mistake in his initial code, it seems likely he will repeat that error in a formal proof. Peer review could improve the failure rate, but that is a whole nother ballgame.
attributed the lack of correctness proofs to laziness on the part of programmers
Whether it's Djikstra or that guy in accounting, people who dismiss problems in code or code development to lazy programmers really piss me off. I mean, if I had a dime for everytime I heard a 9-5 guy talk about a lazy programmer who happened to be working 60 hours a week without extra pay.... Formal proofs, code review, perfect robust design, I'd love to. Whether or not I, or most folks I know, do these things has absolutely nothing to do with laziness or how willing we are to do work, it has to do with the amount of time we are given to do certain segments of work.
I think the article said somewhere that the GUI Template (whatever that means) was patented and that part of the verdict against Baysoft was in fact patent infringement.
Re:If you have the inspiration...
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
After hundreds of calls I've NEVER had someone irritated. Becauyse i don't bullshit.
The moment someone calls me unsolicited trying to sell me something, I'm irritated. I have a hard time believing this is not the case for that vast majority of the human species. Which is not to say that your services might not be valuable... in fact I can envision many scenarios where it would be advantageous to periodically bring in a consultant if for no other reason than to evaluate IT processes and methods.
Seriously, maybe it is a reasonable deal. If not, why wouldn't more bands form their own labels? Well sure that stuff costs a lot of money and there is probably a lot of risk involved, but that's part of what those big companies are there for. If I'm not mistaken, they suck up a lot of the risk and do most of the nitty gritty stuff of promo-ing the band and distributing materials.
If you want to be a national/international hit at 20, there are going to be trade offs. If an artist knowingly signs a contract stating they get a certain cut, I'm not going to complain about it or use it as a justification for downloading unlicensed music, just because, I, in my extremely uninformed state, happen to think the artist's cut is too small. It's no different than all those people out there who think bandwidth is free just because they don't see the costs associated with it.
Just because it cost them X to create a proprietary code base does not actually mean that that code base is actually worth X (or even that it is worth anything at all).
First, you can't laugh away the added cost by assuming all development firm's code is worthless. Having worked for a consulting firm turned software development, I can say their accumulated code was extremely valuable to continued development in our area.
Excluding GPL software vastly restricts the codebase available for development.
Whoa nelly. Does "not restricting government contracts to BSD and GNU style licenses" imply that we are excluding GPL licenses (because that is what I said)? If I'm not mistaken, there are conditions where GPL and Proprietary code can walk hand in hand on the same project.
The question I've always had about the GPL.... let's say I have a compiled.NET component that is developed initially for use in an GPL licensed project? Is the source to that component necessay or not? What if the component is written a long time ago for another purpose, can it be included in a GPL project without disclosing the source? What, if anything, differentiates a group's binary components from someone like microsoft's?
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
So if I read that correctly, GPL code can not contain anything when any part of the source is closed? It seems to completely exclude anything Microsoft based (or many other companies) because it requires that the source code for identifiable subcomponents be distributed alongside the main source... things like Regex's, DataSets, Crypto libraries, etc....
So why can't corporations adapt, and use govt code in the way that brings the most benefit to all of society?
Why can't penguins learn to fly or senators learn to program? It's just not what they do. Furthermore, corporations voluntarily optimizing their business to for the maximum benefit of society is about as likely as the government efficiently (across the board, not single project) contracting out valuable public domain code.
The point is that no corp would have that code without the govt forcing them to fund it via tax.
Maybe they already have part of the code due to other contracts or unsponsored in-house development. And for the love of god, there is a huge difference in price between a usage license and an ownership license. There's room for both in the world.
I think my point got missed somewhere in there....
If the government department chooses to not release the code to a third party.. guess what?
I couldn't care less about what anyone does with code they own the rights to distribute. My concern is that software development firms will not be able to use their million dollar established code bases for typical government projects because they will be forced to open the source for the project and the value of the project will likely not exceed the invested value of the code base. Restricting government contracts to BSD and GNU style licenses greatly and uneccessarily reduces software development options.
Government using GPL code is excelent in my view. Only the vendors wanting lock-in are opposed to it.
That's a reasonably valid argument, so let me ammend my previous post a bit. I don't mind so much releasing a product's source so much as I mind giving distribution rights of that source away (in situations like described above). So, in short, if the government were to demand the source code to all custom projects, I could live with that, but I think forcing all firms to free all government contracted code to the world is just silly. If the situation merits it, that's fine, but these kind of oversweeping rules are the essence of government waste.
Sounds complicated. My brain usually starts crapping out when it hits 3 distinct concurrent language syntaxes.
it was documented extensively. Partly because I didn't want to forget how it worked, and partly because I had no wish to inflict that kind of torture on any co-workers who had to get in there behind me.
While I agree that, for my own selfish advantage, I would prefer a BSD style license to a GPL, I don't like the idea of mandatory open source on any level. It requires a lot more time and effort to engineer solid reusable code than it does to craft not so reusable special purpose code.
If I am a consulting company or a software development company that has invested years developing a solid reusable code base, then it is likely I will be able to develop certain applications at a fraction of the full development cost simultaneously using a number of tried and true components. If, in order to acquire a contract, I am forced to open the complete source of the project, then the price will go up dramatically. Either I will be required to forfeit the exclusive rights to my code base who's value likely exceeds the worth of the project, or I will be required to write a specialized application from scratch (or obviously GNU or/xor BSD licensed components).
Also, let's look at this from the perspective of a government agency. If the IRS is commissioning some specialized data entry software for digitizing snail mail tax returns, do they really and truly need the full source to that application? Sure, anyone who has worked with proprietary software knows how annoying it can be to have to maintain a closed system, but honestly, how much is having the source really worth? Double? Tripple? Quadruple?
I use closed source applications everyday: Windows, Visual Studio, Office, Winamp, Media Player, Star Craft, Trillian, AVG, TweakUI, etc. I also use a great deal of open source software and Linux pcs outnumber Windows in my home 5 to 1. I try to use the best tool for the job at the best price. To have Uncle Sam do anything else, would be to waste my money. Buy only what you need. Let the markets decide.
Slashdot Mirror
In the interview, McBride claimed their were hundreds of thousands of tainted lines and he implied rather directly, that simply excising these portions of code might not be practical or satisfactory. His suggestion involved going back to a 2.2 kernel since most if not all of the identified infringements were made in 2.4.
In the interview, McBride mumbled something about what sounded like a public show and tell session August 17th or 18th. Of course then again, he also said that if anyone wanted to come in and check themselves they were welcome to do so :) Field trip anyone?
McBride was asked about this directly in the interview. His response was a little hazy but basically, he pointed to two arguments.
First he said something about the GPL providing an out, in which I believe he was referencing section 7. This section is about patent/copyright infringement and about how if you can not distribute under the terms of the gpl, then you simply can't distribute. He seemed to be under the impression that SCO was no longer distributing (but I thought they were?)
Second, McBride claimed that federal copyright law (no idea where) specified that you could not accidentally give away your copyright. It is pretty easy to envision a scenario of SCO ip seeping into linux via a third party without SCO knowing, resulting in it's accidental distribution by SCO. Of course, if this clause to copyright does exist, I'd be curious to find out who holds the burden of proof. Considering the scope of the allegations McBride made against Linux and the fact that they distributed their own version of Linux for so many years, it would seem unlikely that the level of infringement SCO indicates would have gone unnoticed for so long (right up until the moment when the company is circling the drain).
most (if not all) businesses that say they have the lowest price in town honor pricematching of local competitors.
Matching the lowest price in town is not the same as having the lowest price in town. If I walk up to Best Buy and say, "give me the lowest price in town for that television," they are going to tell me that if I find a lower price within 30 days, they will refund me the difference but for now I can just pay their price. When they say they have the lowest price in town, not only are they not offering the lowest price in town, but they generally don't even know the lowest price in town. Furthermore, if they do know a competitor offers the same product for a lower price, they are not going to give me that price unless I explicitly ask for it. Here be willful deception.
Me too. My grandfather is arguably the most intelligent person I know. At last count he had 6 or 7 degrees and had written over 20 books. For a number of years, he was near the top in the US department of forestry. He's been given keys to cities. You should see him try to use a computer with one of those new fangled graphical user interfaces.
In reality, what most people generally think of as intelligence has very little to do with an individual's capacity to learn or achieve. More often than not we seem to measure an individual's intelligence, or rather stupidity, based on their ability to not do something that we ourselves know better than.
which is certainly possible -- many parts are quite vague
I agree that many parts of the GPL/LGPL are too vague. Reading through the FAQs there are segments where the people explaining the license admit uncertainty as to what exactly it means and what they are allowing and disallowing. A prime example of this is in the Mere Aggregation section of the FAQ where there's a nice little quote, "What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide.". This portion of the FAQ does give some examples and rough guidelines but ultimately it seems to abdicate the actual decision. We're left with an ambiguous interpretation of an ambiguous license.
We're developers here, we live and die by detailed specifications. We bitch and moan when we don't get them. Why do we permit this level of ambiguity?
disallows you from ever using those licenses with Java unless you somehow manage to avoid using any of the base Java runtime library code?
I believe there is some kind of exemption allowing you to use the libraries and code normally distributed with a compiler or platform without that code having to be gpl or lgpl. So, since the base libraries come with the Java platform, they are ok.
... and pick up your open wireless access point... but is it right for me to even be on your private network at all?
Fine by me, that's why I left the WAP open.
What if you had used WEP and I cracked it and got onto your network
You can passively crack all the WEP signals you want. I don't care, but I would think that cracking the resource AND using it would be some kind of trespass since there was no implied consent. A similar logic would apply to a cordless phone base station.
Please excuse me while I step back into my faraday cage.
On the contrary, I would speculate that resources for the criminal and civil court systems are at some point bound together. There's only so much money and so many lawyers to go around.
better than a tin foil hat
I'd rather have no security than snake oil. This looks like it might slow down or stop a certain percentage of RIAA efforts, but I would venture a guess that the efforts the RIAA exerts to find particular sharers would be trivial compared to the actual costs of litigation. In other words, this is probably not going to hinder them that much overall.
Actually, if I were the RIAA, this would be exactly the kind of protection I would want a file sharing network to employ. It is easily defeatable so when they start prosecuting people who thought they were anonymous, it could substantially lower public trust in secure file sharing networks.
Just to reitterate/expand, the courses I'm talking about are one credit hour and are graded pass/fail. We do have a couple programming languages courses, but this is not a course to teach you how to program in language x, rather it is a survey of different aspects of different languages. In other words, we're not talking about core or even remotely important curriculum. Instead this is fluff and filler designed to cater to the more practical needs of students.
You say that teaching proprietary tech is IT not CS, but I say IT is a part of CS. Furthermore, I would not be willing to exclude innovative proprietary technology on the sole basis of it being proprietary.
All are multi-platform, company agnostic and most (all?) have a free compiler and operating system to learn and experiment on./i>
From what I understand, mono, which has nothing to do with microsoft, is coming along nicely. Also, if I'm not mistaken, MS gives a way a free command line compiler. Since I've never used it I'm not sure how free it is. As for having an Operating System to experiment on, the vast majority of Computer Science majors I've known are far far more comfortable with and have greater access to windows. Also, at least at Ohio State, there's a microsoft club that gives away copies of visual studio, and if that fails there's always a copy of the buckeye bundle (which includes Visual Studio for $100). I mean, in the grand scheme of a college education, $100 isn't that much. I've had textbooks cost more than that and those were worth far less. Anyways, we're not talking about mandatory courses.
There's only one place you're going to use 'XYZ'.NET
Would that be Earth? It's got to be one of the most in demand tech skills today.
What's VB have to offer academia besides "you can develop crap real fast."
Isn't that enough? Would you rather learn cobol or fortran?
Why should they teach VB or C#?
.NET isn't really taught any other place at OSU.
Well, the stated intention of these 1 credit hour language courses is a mix of resume filler and some niche offerings for various business and science majors. C Sharp, and in particular VB, are widely used and as such are potentially useful things to have on one's resume. Sure it's true that they might not offer some of the innovations of other languages like lisp, but on the other hand, the style of software development used in COM and
What is wrong with a university providing access to or even some courses involving proprietary technology? Obviously, there are problems if you are basing your curriculum around a particular vendor or set of vendors, but what is so bad about having small elective courses that use proprietary tech? Ohio State had one credit hour courses in lisp, cobol, fortran, c, c++, java, and unix shell scripting. The advertised purpose of the courses was to give students some additional ammunition to add to their generally skill-free resumes. Why not visual basic and c sharp?
Disclaimer - I was never particularly fond of Djikstra. He seemed to be too wordy and too self important, which is not to say he didn't make some good contributions.
software is so poor in quality nowadays because developers don't really bother to come up with formal proofs of correctness for their programs
Asides from it being perposterous to expect all the developers in the world to write formal proofs for their programs, this statement is at best a wild assumption. He is proposing that the lack of use of a particular (his) potential solution to a problem is the root cause of the problem. Also, I've got to doubt that formal proofs would be worth nearly the tradeoff in terms of time. If you think about it, a program is itself akin to a proof of correctness. If a coder makes a mistake in his initial code, it seems likely he will repeat that error in a formal proof. Peer review could improve the failure rate, but that is a whole nother ballgame.
attributed the lack of correctness proofs to laziness on the part of programmers
Whether it's Djikstra or that guy in accounting, people who dismiss problems in code or code development to lazy programmers really piss me off. I mean, if I had a dime for everytime I heard a 9-5 guy talk about a lazy programmer who happened to be working 60 hours a week without extra pay.... Formal proofs, code review, perfect robust design, I'd love to. Whether or not I, or most folks I know, do these things has absolutely nothing to do with laziness or how willing we are to do work, it has to do with the amount of time we are given to do certain segments of work.
I think the article said somewhere that the GUI Template (whatever that means) was patented and that part of the verdict against Baysoft was in fact patent infringement.
After hundreds of calls I've NEVER had someone irritated. Becauyse i don't bullshit.
The moment someone calls me unsolicited trying to sell me something, I'm irritated. I have a hard time believing this is not the case for that vast majority of the human species. Which is not to say that your services might not be valuable... in fact I can envision many scenarios where it would be advantageous to periodically bring in a consultant if for no other reason than to evaluate IT processes and methods.
AOL Time Warner for one... but in general, I've found this website to be useful in that regard.
Columbia Journalism Review
Oh wait, were you asking for Newsweek examples? I got nothing.
The artist agreed to that contract, it's their problem, not our execuse.
Seriously, maybe it is a reasonable deal. If not, why wouldn't more bands form their own labels? Well sure that stuff costs a lot of money and there is probably a lot of risk involved, but that's part of what those big companies are there for. If I'm not mistaken, they suck up a lot of the risk and do most of the nitty gritty stuff of promo-ing the band and distributing materials.
If you want to be a national/international hit at 20, there are going to be trade offs. If an artist knowingly signs a contract stating they get a certain cut, I'm not going to complain about it or use it as a justification for downloading unlicensed music, just because, I, in my extremely uninformed state, happen to think the artist's cut is too small. It's no different than all those people out there who think bandwidth is free just because they don't see the costs associated with it.
Just because it cost them X to create a proprietary code base does not actually mean that that code base is actually worth X (or even that it is worth anything at all).
.NET component that is developed initially for use in an GPL licensed project? Is the source to that component necessay or not? What if the component is written a long time ago for another purpose, can it be included in a GPL project without disclosing the source? What, if anything, differentiates a group's binary components from someone like microsoft's?
First, you can't laugh away the added cost by assuming all development firm's code is worthless. Having worked for a consulting firm turned software development, I can say their accumulated code was extremely valuable to continued development in our area.
Excluding GPL software vastly restricts the codebase available for development.
Whoa nelly. Does "not restricting government contracts to BSD and GNU style licenses" imply that we are excluding GPL licenses (because that is what I said)? If I'm not mistaken, there are conditions where GPL and Proprietary code can walk hand in hand on the same project.
The question I've always had about the GPL.... let's say I have a compiled
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
So if I read that correctly, GPL code can not contain anything when any part of the source is closed? It seems to completely exclude anything Microsoft based (or many other companies) because it requires that the source code for identifiable subcomponents be distributed alongside the main source... things like Regex's, DataSets, Crypto libraries, etc....
So why can't corporations adapt, and use govt code in the way that brings the most benefit to all of society?
Why can't penguins learn to fly or senators learn to program? It's just not what they do. Furthermore, corporations voluntarily optimizing their business to for the maximum benefit of society is about as likely as the government efficiently (across the board, not single project) contracting out valuable public domain code.
The point is that no corp would have that code without the govt forcing them to fund it via tax.
Maybe they already have part of the code due to other contracts or unsponsored in-house development. And for the love of god, there is a huge difference in price between a usage license and an ownership license. There's room for both in the world.
I think my point got missed somewhere in there....
If the government department chooses to not release the code to a third party.. guess what?
I couldn't care less about what anyone does with code they own the rights to distribute. My concern is that software development firms will not be able to use their million dollar established code bases for typical government projects because they will be forced to open the source for the project and the value of the project will likely not exceed the invested value of the code base. Restricting government contracts to BSD and GNU style licenses greatly and uneccessarily reduces software development options.
Government using GPL code is excelent in my view. Only the vendors wanting lock-in are opposed to it.
That's a reasonably valid argument, so let me ammend my previous post a bit. I don't mind so much releasing a product's source so much as I mind giving distribution rights of that source away (in situations like described above). So, in short, if the government were to demand the source code to all custom projects, I could live with that, but I think forcing all firms to free all government contracted code to the world is just silly. If the situation merits it, that's fine, but these kind of oversweeping rules are the essence of government waste.
Sounds complicated. My brain usually starts crapping out when it hits 3 distinct concurrent language syntaxes.
it was documented extensively. Partly because I didn't want to forget how it worked, and partly because I had no wish to inflict that kind of torture on any co-workers who had to get in there behind me.
Good man.
While I agree that, for my own selfish advantage, I would prefer a BSD style license to a GPL, I don't like the idea of mandatory open source on any level. It requires a lot more time and effort to engineer solid reusable code than it does to craft not so reusable special purpose code.
If I am a consulting company or a software development company that has invested years developing a solid reusable code base, then it is likely I will be able to develop certain applications at a fraction of the full development cost simultaneously using a number of tried and true components. If, in order to acquire a contract, I am forced to open the complete source of the project, then the price will go up dramatically. Either I will be required to forfeit the exclusive rights to my code base who's value likely exceeds the worth of the project, or I will be required to write a specialized application from scratch (or obviously GNU or/xor BSD licensed components).
Also, let's look at this from the perspective of a government agency. If the IRS is commissioning some specialized data entry software for digitizing snail mail tax returns, do they really and truly need the full source to that application? Sure, anyone who has worked with proprietary software knows how annoying it can be to have to maintain a closed system, but honestly, how much is having the source really worth? Double? Tripple? Quadruple?
I use closed source applications everyday: Windows, Visual Studio, Office, Winamp, Media Player, Star Craft, Trillian, AVG, TweakUI, etc. I also use a great deal of open source software and Linux pcs outnumber Windows in my home 5 to 1. I try to use the best tool for the job at the best price. To have Uncle Sam do anything else, would be to waste my money. Buy only what you need. Let the markets decide.