Sheldon, I gave specific examples, and cited actual financial savings. Your response is nothing but unsubstantiated puffery that doesn't do anything but insult me in a hope that your point isn't diminished. I'm sorry, but I'm not buying your buzzwords that appear to lack hands-on experience. I stand by my examples and I see nothing you have offered as a counter-claim.
If I contribute code to a GPL project, I don't expect ownership of the project, but I am only permitting them to use it under the terms of the GPL
Actually, depending on the project, that may not be true. I think what you suggest is ideal, perfect. Many do it as you describe. But not all. In fact, the Free Software Foundation itself doesn't take patches under GPL. The reason is simple: they DO want to be able to change the license. In the case of the FSF, you have a hopefully-ethical group who will likely just relicense code under new versions of the GPL, which one would assume will be fine. But you do have to read the fine print carefully. If you personally, mindstrm, have really contributed code, you might want to go back and see if you gave up any rights you didn't intend to give up.
So the lesson is... Don't try to work with the OSS community, becuase they will screw you over?
Hi Sheldon. I'm sure that's not what the OP meant. I suspect he might find it more accurate to say "don't take code and patches from developers under then guise of GPL and then relicense the work they gave you." However, I suspect that a company who would feel as you describe -- that this is "screwing over" the company rather than the contributors -- should go right ahead and feel that way, and walk. I in no way speak for the OSS community, but as a lone developer, I don't want companies to take my patches under the GPL and then relicense them. That's not ethical, and if unethical companies leave the OSS community, it's not much of a loss. It may be a gain. Again, please know that this is only my opinion and probably isn't shared by many.
Recent trends are likely to improve the situation of the individual artists, who, with cheap, good audio software and fatpipe connections, will be able to distribute directly to consumers
But I dispute that artists will ever be able to be successful on their own, and I cite your own words to back up my argument:
who would pay for "intellectual property" when they can receive an exact copy for free
Exactly. Musicians -- whether big label or independent -- will not be paid for their wares online.
server administration requires much less admin time on linux - we estimate it is a 3 to 1 difference
That rings true with my experience, but would you also agree that initial setup and deployment takes much more admin time on Linux? In my experience, doing the install, doing the configuring, applying the patches, tuning -- all that takes a whole lotta time on Linux. But once you've done it, you can mostly walk away from the box, come back a year or two later, and find it still running nicely (I wouldn't advise that, because you want to patch your boxes regularly, but still, I've seen Linux boxes with uptime measured in years). It's a love/hate thing -- I wish initial deployment could be more of a push-a-button-and-go kind of thing, like Windows, but I don't want the push-a-button-and-crash kind of thing, like Windows.
I feel Microsoft's software is substantially better than any solution one could deploy with Linux
Please tell me that you mean that in the context of the article -- that MS would have been better in this case, if only the licensing were better. I could belive that. But if you mean to imply that MS is substantially better across the board, that's just absurd. I am doing things with PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Linux that NT and 2000 just can't do. Not "MS is a little weaker" but MS doesn't even offer it. For example, PHP shared sessions on a server farm -- MS says "wait until ASP.net!" And working with mod_rewrite for on-the-fly, behind-the-scenes rewriting of URLs (NOT the same as a redirect). And for that matter, the server farm itself -- with Linux and LVS, I put together an easy 3 box farm for $15,000, and it's faster than the $50,000 machine it replaced. That's superior technology.
Standard practice, when you can't get someone extradited, is to arrest them when they set foot in your country.
What you went on to describe -- someone breaks a law in one state, flees that state, and is arrested upon return -- is standard practice, to be sure. But what I referred to is the arrest of a person who did something legal in his home country. To fit it into your scenario, the person was never in Massachusetts, did something perfectly legal in some other state, and then was captured for breaking a Massachusetts law even though he wasn't in Massachusetts. That is NOT standard practice.
I am not sure what kind of force the Australian government is prepared to use to impose its laws
Probably, they'll do just as the USA has done: wait for people to come visit, and then arrest them as they get off the plane. We did that here in the USA to Dmitry, and I'm sure some countries are now happy to play by these "new" rules.
I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc (which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away.
Does not play well with others. End of story.
Who? Stallman? Yes, I agree. Stallman is not playing well with others.
Of course, you really mean to imply that Drepper isn't playing nice. However, when I think about Drepper putting in all those hours to contribute code to something that helps sooooo many people out, and then I think about Stallman swooping in and saying "this is mine now" -- well, frankly, I feel for Drepper. I would think and feel the same way if someone tried to lay claim to something I had put a good part of my life into.
I totally agree with Linux being called GNU/Linux when talking about an entire distribution instead of just the kernel.
I guess the problem is that Linus Torvalds doesn't. He says, "rms asked me if I minded the name before starting to use it, and I said 'go ahead'. I didn't think it would explode into the large discussion it resulted in, and I also thought that rms would only use it for the specific release of Linux that the FSF was working on rather than 'every' Linux system." Looks like RMS is trying to do a "land grab" for more than glibc.
Citing my sources: read what Linus has to say here.
They're still using the evil gcc 2.96, and not only that, the users in MandrakeForums want it that way. I am just not their market anymore, I guess. I see gcc 3.0 out with 3.01 coming, and my first thought is: "great, they can break free of Red Hat's crappy decision!" But the Mandrake users appear to want Red Hat compatibility even to the point of following Red Hat's bad ideas. Oh well. I was holding out for 8.1. I guess it's time to find alternatives.
Re:Lower sales for the monopolist
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
The game sales are off, it's lost it's luster. After Columbine, parents want their kids out riding a bike...SNIP...
Odd. I thought many games, including one in which you raise undead armies and descend into Hell to battle demons, were breaking sales records.
Only PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING(tm) edit config files
I agree. But here's the thing: we're talking about how Apache just lost marketshare to the pointy-clicky IIS types. So I'm going to make a break from my/. brethren and suggest the following: lower the bar. Don't cater to Only People Who Know What They Are Doing(tm). Find out what tools stupid people need to become competent, and give them that. If stupid people don't like to read and hack.conf files, fine. Build a GUI with mouseover help and wizards that protect them from themselves. Surprisingly, you will find that many people are comfortable admitting that they are stupid and want a product that lets them stay stupid. In fact, while I fully geek-out on computers, I will pay through the teeth to not have to think for one single second about my car. I trust the car to be safe, and if it breaks, I find a shop to fix it and spare me the details. Do the mechanics make fun of me? I don't care. I'll make fun of myself in that regard -- "I'm car-challenged!" But I will not stop driving. Apache is losing market share? People will not stop serving Web pages, even if they're Web-challenged. So we have to fix it and spare the details, or cede that market to MS.
What's the problem here? We've got and open source database that's being developed in two somewhat different directions by NuSphere and MySQL AB
I think there is a subtle difference between merely forking someone's code and forking someone's code but passing it off as the original. Nu does not own that code, and Nu did not originate that code. Yet they put up a Web site which tries to pass itself off as the official source. And this has somehow led to a journalist being so confused as to call the original coding house "a competitor." Sure they compete, that's good. But it is more accurate to call MySQL AB the originator and Nu the competitor. Nu is the new kid on the block that just entered the market. The more they try to pass themselves off as the official source, the more they upset people in this community who know better. They're misrepresenting the situation, and that's not ethical.
In slashdot's earlier article (a week or two previous), Nu's comment about "the GPL is not enforcable" doesn't exactly bode well either -- Nu is getting ready to do some seriously rogue shit, and I don't want to support that.
No it's not. I'd say it's a pretty accurate assessment of the open source community as a whole.
Your rebuttal is not a rebuttal. I agree with you -- if there is a free product that works, the Open Source community will use it. I completely concede that point, but I never objected to that point in the first place. The generalization that I objected to was that the Open Source community is full of software pirates who trade in warez. I do not believe that, even if you post a million rebutalls telling me how wrong I am. Again, I agree that this community uses free software, but I do not agree that this community freely steals software. I'm partly here because I don't want to steal -- I don't want to steal PhotoShop, so I use the GIMP. I don't want to steal MS Office, so I use Star Office. That is not unethical. It is legal to create a free software product and use it. It is not legal to take a commerical product and pirate it. I don't advocate that, and I don't agree that it is an accurate generalization of the community.
does it come as a surprise to any people that a company whose only busienss was selling games to a community that would rather pirate them, than have to go all the way out to the store to buy them, would quickly go out of business
Ouch, that's some kind of generalization! It's right up there with "all internet users are perverts." A couple months ago, I bought copies of some Loki games for Linux just to support them -- I haven't even installed the games. I hope to. But mostly I wanted to freely give them cash for their products to encourage them to make more products. I do not think it is reasonable or accurate to paint the Linux community with such a broad brush. Some of us spend extra on open source software just because of the principle involved.
I've been right in the thick of this lately, converting my 7-computer home (macs, linux, windows) into a 100% Linux home. My low-end computer is a 75 mhz 486 laptop with 4 megs of RAM, my high-end is a 750 mhz P3 with 192 megs of RAM. Here are my thoughts after getting into it with a lot of distros.
Red Hat is the default most new users would pick. As BigBlockMopar said in another post, it's what most howtos and guides assume you're using. They have marketshare, they have a GUI installer, they're relatively stable. They also don't invoke a die-hard following much anymore, probably because of stunts like the non-compatible gcc compiler included in the most recent releases. I also agree with BigBlockMopar that the.0 releases suck. His suggestion to stick with 6.2 and patch it, or wait for 7.2, that's good advice. I loooooveed 6.2 and 5.2.
Mandrake is clearly targeting the Windows-refugees. Their installer is slick, it detects even obscure hardware for you, it sets up a nice-looking GUI, lots of point-and-click tools. It also has a security setup which I love -- you can turn on a small firewall, set security to "paranoid" and really protect your machine. But Mandrake's 8.0 is like Red Hat's 7.0 -- buggy. Their graphical RPM tool will lock up if it can't do passive FTP -- it doesn't appear to time out or have any code to fail gracefully. The AbiWord fonts completely screwed up the 8.0 release, some text is almost unreadable. The TuxRacer game will die if you use KDE. But the community is great. It's the only place you can go, say "I love how Windows does this" and not get flamed. People are really friendly. 8.1 should be a delicious release if they squeeze in gcc 3.0 and X-Windows 4.1.
Debian is great because of apt-get. It lets you install just a very core Linux setup, and then add bits & pieces safely, as needed. But the installer is painful -- one install literally took about 6 hours, because there is a whole LOT of detail in there. You can switch packages on and off at a very granular level. Didn't help that during the video card part of the install, it locked up. But I still like this distro for one big reason: it will install on my lame old 486 laptop with almost no RAM. It's a miracle I can shoehorn anything onto that machine, and Debian does it. Debian is usually only downloaded, they don't much sell CDs. Debian is run by volunteers, so the system really works well, people put TLC into the bits they help with. But that also means packages fall behind if the maintainer is busy or loses interest, and it isn't really a mainstream consumer product. Progeny is a commercial version of Debian that is more up to date.
Small Linux is another good Linux for old old computers. It comes on 2 floppy disks for install, and you can run off a disk if you wish. I tried to copy it to my 486 hard drive, but it got too complicated and I bailed for Debian.
Here are three that I don't use (although I used to play with Slackware). First, Slackware's package tool isn't really a package tool. It doesn't resolve dependencies. I'm fairly good at Linux, but I still consider Slackware too advanced for me. It is the most up-to-date Linux release right now though. Second, I haven't tried SuSe, although I've lusted after it a little in the stores. It's a good, big distribution, lots of apps. Nice and graphical. But it also needs a lot of RAM -- I think 64 megs was the recommended base. This will be best on modern, fast machines, I think. Third, I don't use Caldera because their new license don't allow users to freely install Linux on multiple machines. More money for them, which is good (Linux vendors need to survive), but I don't use them because of it.
Lastly, some advice in general: if you're going to be installing on older machines, remember to AVOID using Gnome or KDE. Install them to get their apps, but then also install IceWM or WindowMaker, and use those instead. IceWM runs apps from other window managers really well, and it's responsive. It's what I'll be using on my 486 laptop when I get it upgraded to 20 megs of RAM.
Re:KDE 2s2 feature depth is astounding
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
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· Score: 3, Interesting
KDE now "attaches" the 16x16 icon of th program you asked to launch to the mouse cursor, throbbing gently until the app comes up. this gives *useful* feedback to the user.
Holy crap, that's great. Just my luck, my posts are typically so full of sarcasm, that no one will think I'm serious here, but I am. People do the "double-click... double-click again" thing all the time. I've been using computers for a couple decades now, and I still do it on occasion, because there isn't any feedback. KDE just solved a long, long time problem. I hope other Operating Systems steal this idea and improve upon it. Unfortunately, Microsoft won't on principle: they'll say the "idea" is "infected" with the GPL (argh, there's that sarcasm again, I've got to get rid of it).
they will deny the charge and, if that doesn't work, deny that the GPL is enforceable.
This certainly makes one thing clear: if NuSphere had ever wanted to be portrayed kindly, they clearly blew their cover here. No one with any respect for the GPL or the GPL community would go to court on the grounds that "the GPL isn't enforceable." NuSphere betrayed the very community they rely on.
you can't sell the distro yourself. The code for yast is otherwise completly compaitble with the GPL.
So let me be sure I have this correct. The original post criticizes SuSE for its non-GPL installer, and your rebuttal is, umm, something like this: "except for the fact that it's not GPL compatible, it's otherwise compatible." ROTFL. I'm sure you won lots of debates in your speech classes.
This is fun. Let's try some others. How about: "except for the speed, walking is just as fast as running." Oooo! Or this: "except for the financial value, a $1 bill is worth just as much as a $100 bill." Sigh. Good times.
Adobe Illustrator is NOT descriptive. It is a vector based drawing program. Word is a Word Processor. Word is used descriptively. Word is a WEAKER trademark in this regards than Illustrator.
Hmmmmm... let me try:
Microsoft Word is NOT descriptive. It is a styled text editing program. Illustrator is an illustration tool. Illustrator is used descriptively. Illustrator is a WEAKER trademark in this regard than Word.
Building a lengthy argument on semantics is like building a house upon the sand....
Slashdot Mirror
Sheldon, I gave specific examples, and cited actual financial savings. Your response is nothing but unsubstantiated puffery that doesn't do anything but insult me in a hope that your point isn't diminished. I'm sorry, but I'm not buying your buzzwords that appear to lack hands-on experience. I stand by my examples and I see nothing you have offered as a counter-claim.
Actually, depending on the project, that may not be true. I think what you suggest is ideal, perfect. Many do it as you describe. But not all. In fact, the Free Software Foundation itself doesn't take patches under GPL. The reason is simple: they DO want to be able to change the license. In the case of the FSF, you have a hopefully-ethical group who will likely just relicense code under new versions of the GPL, which one would assume will be fine. But you do have to read the fine print carefully. If you personally, mindstrm, have really contributed code, you might want to go back and see if you gave up any rights you didn't intend to give up.
You say this:
But I dispute that artists will ever be able to be successful on their own, and I cite your own words to back up my argument:
Exactly. Musicians -- whether big label or independent -- will not be paid for their wares online.
That rings true with my experience, but would you also agree that initial setup and deployment takes much more admin time on Linux? In my experience, doing the install, doing the configuring, applying the patches, tuning -- all that takes a whole lotta time on Linux. But once you've done it, you can mostly walk away from the box, come back a year or two later, and find it still running nicely (I wouldn't advise that, because you want to patch your boxes regularly, but still, I've seen Linux boxes with uptime measured in years). It's a love/hate thing -- I wish initial deployment could be more of a push-a-button-and-go kind of thing, like Windows, but I don't want the push-a-button-and-crash kind of thing, like Windows.
Please tell me that you mean that in the context of the article -- that MS would have been better in this case, if only the licensing were better. I could belive that. But if you mean to imply that MS is substantially better across the board, that's just absurd. I am doing things with PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Linux that NT and 2000 just can't do. Not "MS is a little weaker" but MS doesn't even offer it. For example, PHP shared sessions on a server farm -- MS says "wait until ASP.net!" And working with mod_rewrite for on-the-fly, behind-the-scenes rewriting of URLs (NOT the same as a redirect). And for that matter, the server farm itself -- with Linux and LVS, I put together an easy 3 box farm for $15,000, and it's faster than the $50,000 machine it replaced. That's superior technology.
What you went on to describe -- someone breaks a law in one state, flees that state, and is arrested upon return -- is standard practice, to be sure. But what I referred to is the arrest of a person who did something legal in his home country. To fit it into your scenario, the person was never in Massachusetts, did something perfectly legal in some other state, and then was captured for breaking a Massachusetts law even though he wasn't in Massachusetts. That is NOT standard practice.
Probably, they'll do just as the USA has done: wait for people to come visit, and then arrest them as they get off the plane. We did that here in the USA to Dmitry, and I'm sure some countries are now happy to play by these "new" rules.
Huh? Yes it does. How old is your information?
Who? Stallman? Yes, I agree. Stallman is not playing well with others.
Of course, you really mean to imply that Drepper isn't playing nice. However, when I think about Drepper putting in all those hours to contribute code to something that helps sooooo many people out, and then I think about Stallman swooping in and saying "this is mine now" -- well, frankly, I feel for Drepper. I would think and feel the same way if someone tried to lay claim to something I had put a good part of my life into.
I guess the problem is that Linus Torvalds doesn't. He says, "rms asked me if I minded the name before starting to use it, and I said 'go ahead'. I didn't think it would explode into the large discussion it resulted in, and I also thought that rms would only use it for the specific release of Linux that the FSF was working on rather than 'every' Linux system." Looks like RMS is trying to do a "land grab" for more than glibc.
Citing my sources: read what Linus has to say here.
They're still using the evil gcc 2.96, and not only that, the users in MandrakeForums want it that way. I am just not their market anymore, I guess. I see gcc 3.0 out with 3.01 coming, and my first thought is: "great, they can break free of Red Hat's crappy decision!" But the Mandrake users appear to want Red Hat compatibility even to the point of following Red Hat's bad ideas. Oh well. I was holding out for 8.1. I guess it's time to find alternatives.
Odd. I thought many games, including one in which you raise undead armies and descend into Hell to battle demons, were breaking sales records.
Zeppelin NT? What, are they trying to crash these things?
I agree. But here's the thing: we're talking about how Apache just lost marketshare to the pointy-clicky IIS types. So I'm going to make a break from my /. brethren and suggest the following: lower the bar. Don't cater to Only People Who Know What They Are Doing(tm). Find out what tools stupid people need to become competent, and give them that. If stupid people don't like to read and hack .conf files, fine. Build a GUI with mouseover help and wizards that protect them from themselves. Surprisingly, you will find that many people are comfortable admitting that they are stupid and want a product that lets them stay stupid. In fact, while I fully geek-out on computers, I will pay through the teeth to not have to think for one single second about my car. I trust the car to be safe, and if it breaks, I find a shop to fix it and spare me the details. Do the mechanics make fun of me? I don't care. I'll make fun of myself in that regard -- "I'm car-challenged!" But I will not stop driving. Apache is losing market share? People will not stop serving Web pages, even if they're Web-challenged. So we have to fix it and spare the details, or cede that market to MS.
I think there is a subtle difference between merely forking someone's code and forking someone's code but passing it off as the original. Nu does not own that code, and Nu did not originate that code. Yet they put up a Web site which tries to pass itself off as the official source. And this has somehow led to a journalist being so confused as to call the original coding house "a competitor." Sure they compete, that's good. But it is more accurate to call MySQL AB the originator and Nu the competitor. Nu is the new kid on the block that just entered the market. The more they try to pass themselves off as the official source, the more they upset people in this community who know better. They're misrepresenting the situation, and that's not ethical.
In slashdot's earlier article (a week or two previous), Nu's comment about "the GPL is not enforcable" doesn't exactly bode well either -- Nu is getting ready to do some seriously rogue shit, and I don't want to support that.
Your rebuttal is not a rebuttal. I agree with you -- if there is a free product that works, the Open Source community will use it. I completely concede that point, but I never objected to that point in the first place. The generalization that I objected to was that the Open Source community is full of software pirates who trade in warez. I do not believe that, even if you post a million rebutalls telling me how wrong I am. Again, I agree that this community uses free software, but I do not agree that this community freely steals software. I'm partly here because I don't want to steal -- I don't want to steal PhotoShop, so I use the GIMP. I don't want to steal MS Office, so I use Star Office. That is not unethical. It is legal to create a free software product and use it. It is not legal to take a commerical product and pirate it. I don't advocate that, and I don't agree that it is an accurate generalization of the community.
Ouch, that's some kind of generalization! It's right up there with "all internet users are perverts." A couple months ago, I bought copies of some Loki games for Linux just to support them -- I haven't even installed the games. I hope to. But mostly I wanted to freely give them cash for their products to encourage them to make more products. I do not think it is reasonable or accurate to paint the Linux community with such a broad brush. Some of us spend extra on open source software just because of the principle involved.
I've been right in the thick of this lately, converting my 7-computer home (macs, linux, windows) into a 100% Linux home. My low-end computer is a 75 mhz 486 laptop with 4 megs of RAM, my high-end is a 750 mhz P3 with 192 megs of RAM. Here are my thoughts after getting into it with a lot of distros.
Red Hat is the default most new users would pick. As BigBlockMopar said in another post, it's what most howtos and guides assume you're using. They have marketshare, they have a GUI installer, they're relatively stable. They also don't invoke a die-hard following much anymore, probably because of stunts like the non-compatible gcc compiler included in the most recent releases. I also agree with BigBlockMopar that the .0 releases suck. His suggestion to stick with 6.2 and patch it, or wait for 7.2, that's good advice. I loooooveed 6.2 and 5.2.
Mandrake is clearly targeting the Windows-refugees. Their installer is slick, it detects even obscure hardware for you, it sets up a nice-looking GUI, lots of point-and-click tools. It also has a security setup which I love -- you can turn on a small firewall, set security to "paranoid" and really protect your machine. But Mandrake's 8.0 is like Red Hat's 7.0 -- buggy. Their graphical RPM tool will lock up if it can't do passive FTP -- it doesn't appear to time out or have any code to fail gracefully. The AbiWord fonts completely screwed up the 8.0 release, some text is almost unreadable. The TuxRacer game will die if you use KDE. But the community is great. It's the only place you can go, say "I love how Windows does this" and not get flamed. People are really friendly. 8.1 should be a delicious release if they squeeze in gcc 3.0 and X-Windows 4.1.
Debian is great because of apt-get. It lets you install just a very core Linux setup, and then add bits & pieces safely, as needed. But the installer is painful -- one install literally took about 6 hours, because there is a whole LOT of detail in there. You can switch packages on and off at a very granular level. Didn't help that during the video card part of the install, it locked up. But I still like this distro for one big reason: it will install on my lame old 486 laptop with almost no RAM. It's a miracle I can shoehorn anything onto that machine, and Debian does it. Debian is usually only downloaded, they don't much sell CDs. Debian is run by volunteers, so the system really works well, people put TLC into the bits they help with. But that also means packages fall behind if the maintainer is busy or loses interest, and it isn't really a mainstream consumer product. Progeny is a commercial version of Debian that is more up to date.
Small Linux is another good Linux for old old computers. It comes on 2 floppy disks for install, and you can run off a disk if you wish. I tried to copy it to my 486 hard drive, but it got too complicated and I bailed for Debian.
Here are three that I don't use (although I used to play with Slackware). First, Slackware's package tool isn't really a package tool. It doesn't resolve dependencies. I'm fairly good at Linux, but I still consider Slackware too advanced for me. It is the most up-to-date Linux release right now though. Second, I haven't tried SuSe, although I've lusted after it a little in the stores. It's a good, big distribution, lots of apps. Nice and graphical. But it also needs a lot of RAM -- I think 64 megs was the recommended base. This will be best on modern, fast machines, I think. Third, I don't use Caldera because their new license don't allow users to freely install Linux on multiple machines. More money for them, which is good (Linux vendors need to survive), but I don't use them because of it.
Lastly, some advice in general: if you're going to be installing on older machines, remember to AVOID using Gnome or KDE. Install them to get their apps, but then also install IceWM or WindowMaker, and use those instead. IceWM runs apps from other window managers really well, and it's responsive. It's what I'll be using on my 486 laptop when I get it upgraded to 20 megs of RAM.
Daaaammmnn I wish I had a mod point for that one.
Holy crap, that's great. Just my luck, my posts are typically so full of sarcasm, that no one will think I'm serious here, but I am. People do the "double-click... double-click again" thing all the time. I've been using computers for a couple decades now, and I still do it on occasion, because there isn't any feedback. KDE just solved a long, long time problem. I hope other Operating Systems steal this idea and improve upon it. Unfortunately, Microsoft won't on principle: they'll say the "idea" is "infected" with the GPL (argh, there's that sarcasm again, I've got to get rid of it).
This certainly makes one thing clear: if NuSphere had ever wanted to be portrayed kindly, they clearly blew their cover here. No one with any respect for the GPL or the GPL community would go to court on the grounds that "the GPL isn't enforceable." NuSphere betrayed the very community they rely on.
So let me be sure I have this correct. The original post criticizes SuSE for its non-GPL installer, and your rebuttal is, umm, something like this: "except for the fact that it's not GPL compatible, it's otherwise compatible." ROTFL. I'm sure you won lots of debates in your speech classes.
This is fun. Let's try some others. How about: "except for the speed, walking is just as fast as running." Oooo! Or this: "except for the financial value, a $1 bill is worth just as much as a $100 bill." Sigh. Good times.
Wow. Thanks for that link. That pretty much shoots to hell Dave's credibility.
Hmmmmm... let me try:
Microsoft Word is NOT descriptive. It is a styled text editing program. Illustrator is an illustration tool. Illustrator is used descriptively. Illustrator is a WEAKER trademark in this regard than Word.
Building a lengthy argument on semantics is like building a house upon the sand....