Can someone tell me why I have to pick a platform target for downloading the JDK javadocs or extended APIs??
Oh, for cryin' out loud. Normally I ignore the mass ignorance on/., but this is just too much. Below is a quote from Sun's download page for the Java 2 documentation.
"The download choices have identical documentation content and differ only in the compression format, so "theoretically" any choice should work on any OS. However, due to tool imcompatibilites, this is not entirely true. Do not download the COMPRESS tar or GZIP tar formats and try to install them with WinZip or a non-Solaris version of tar (such as GNU tar). About 10 of the included files have paths that are 100 characters or longer, and these programs will not install them correctly."
As you can tell, it's OS and tool problems. Sun didn't write your freakin' decompression tools, so don't blame them. (And ironicly enough, it seems to suggest that a GNU tool is at fault here.) At least they went to the trouble of packaging it multiple times and documenting things which is more then I get from most companies or open source projects.
I really like MySQL, but just yesterday I switched to DB/2. I have had corruption in 11M+ record tables three times now, each time completely unrecoverable. Reimporting that many records once was acceptable. Twice scared me. The third time, I switched.
Temper this with the fact that we are using a JDBC driver to access it that might be doing "bad things", and the fact that it seemed to occur during development. I'm guessing it was related to killing processes (during debuggin) and it not cleaning up dropped connections properly. (Lack of transactions, maybe?)
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
If the additions are useful and they won't give them to us, someone will duplicate it in a free form. However, if the proprietary group couldn't have made the additions proprietary in the first place, don't think they would naturally have written them and given them away. The idea might have been lost for good. Let them make want they want. They have an economic incentive to try things. The things that work eventually make it into free source.
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Maybe... But, you could look at it this way: You might think you are denying someone else these all-important rights, but in reality, it would only apply to your modifications.
Before anyone goes ballistic, I understand that the license doesn't say this in any way. However, as long as the original source is still around, anyone can grab the original and have the same rights you had/have. The only exception: your modifications.
Just because you can fork off a new BSD derivative and deny people access to the source code doesn't mean people have to use it. There will have to be a good reason (new features, improvements, etc.) for people to choose it. If people are paying for BSDI when a free version is available, that's their choice. (Besides, how much is Red Hat worth today? Don't think they didn't "profit from" somebody's work. They may "give back to the community", but I haven't seen millions of dollars or millions of dollars worth of code coming from there.)
If you're troubled about Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc., don't think they're doing so well just because a little BSD code got in there. Though BSD folks might think so.;) Realistically, a lot of work has gone into these operating systems, and they offer different features than xBSD.
Note: I'm not trying to knock the GPL here or start (join) a flame war. I just think that some of these arguments against BSD are ignoring common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...
Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library
"by Richard Stallman
This article was written in February 1999."
Draw your own conclusions.
Can someone tell me why I have to pick a platform target for downloading the JDK javadocs or extended APIs??
Oh, for cryin' out loud. Normally I ignore the mass ignorance on /., but this is just too much. Below is a quote from Sun's download page for the Java 2 documentation.
"The download choices have identical documentation content and differ only in the compression format, so "theoretically" any choice should work on any OS. However, due to tool imcompatibilites, this is not entirely true. Do not download the COMPRESS tar or GZIP tar formats and try to install them with WinZip or a non-Solaris version of tar (such as GNU tar). About 10 of the included files have paths that are 100 characters or longer, and these programs will not install them correctly."
As you can tell, it's OS and tool problems. Sun didn't write your freakin' decompression tools, so don't blame them. (And ironicly enough, it seems to suggest that a GNU tool is at fault here.) At least they went to the trouble of packaging it multiple times and documenting things which is more then I get from most companies or open source projects.
I really like MySQL, but just yesterday I switched to DB/2. I have had corruption in 11M+ record tables three times now, each time completely unrecoverable. Reimporting that many records once was acceptable. Twice scared me. The third time, I switched.
Temper this with the fact that we are using a JDBC driver to access it that might be doing "bad things", and the fact that it seemed to occur during development. I'm guessing it was related to killing processes (during debuggin) and it not cleaning up dropped connections properly. (Lack of transactions, maybe?)
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
- mkleehammer
Sorry Millennium, but I didn't quite catch your point. I wasn't really talking about ownership. I was addressing the common complaint that people don't want someone else making a million dollars off of their code. That's their business and that's fine. But when people start using the words "deny" and "rights" to promote the GPL or discredit BSD style licenses, that's when the piles other than socks start getting deep.
More importantly, I think the socks example can be very misleading. I can duplicate an entire software product without modifying the original. With a pile of socks, I cannot. This makes all the difference.
The important point here is that no one is going to modify the original BSD source base and eliminate our rights to it. If the someone copies BSD, modifies it, and sells it, they are obviously not modifying the original copy. The BSD groups themselves maintain the original copies. And technically, anyone with a copy of the source trees helps ensure that we do not lose the original source and license.
To make the socks example fit better, imagine someone can duplicate your entire pile of socks without touching your pile. They then add 2 socks. Somehow, they deny the public rights related to their pile. What rights have they really denied the public? The difference between your free pile and their non-free pile is 2 socks. 2 socks only. Their modifications only. That's it. That is why I claim that the rights issue only involves their modifications (2 socks in this example). And hey, aren't those 2 socks their business? Who are we to demand that they give us the source to their additions?
If the additions are useful and they won't give them to us, someone will duplicate it in a free form. However, if the proprietary group couldn't have made the additions proprietary in the first place, don't think they would naturally have written them and given them away. The idea might have been lost for good. Let them make want they want. They have an economic incentive to try things. The things that work eventually make it into free source.
From this point of view, there is no issue at all. The "problem" doesn't exist. If we're trying to promote free software, let's write some free software. If we're trying to push some other agenda, perhaps our software licenses are not the best avenue.
- mkleehammer
Maybe... But, you could look at it this way: You might think you are denying someone else these all-important rights, but in reality, it would only apply to your modifications.
Before anyone goes ballistic, I understand that the license doesn't say this in any way. However, as long as the original source is still around, anyone can grab the original and have the same rights you had/have. The only exception: your modifications.
Just because you can fork off a new BSD derivative and deny people access to the source code doesn't mean people have to use it. There will have to be a good reason (new features, improvements, etc.) for people to choose it. If people are paying for BSDI when a free version is available, that's their choice. (Besides, how much is Red Hat worth today? Don't think they didn't "profit from" somebody's work. They may "give back to the community", but I haven't seen millions of dollars or millions of dollars worth of code coming from there.)
If you're troubled about Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc., don't think they're doing so well just because a little BSD code got in there. Though BSD folks might think so. ;) Realistically, a lot of work has gone into these operating systems, and they offer different features than xBSD.