The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court.
People often say this. But nobody has ever taken it to court. The reason? The lawyers can't find a loophole or error in it, so nobody dares to risk it.
They're just fixing an old mistake. People have been complaining for a long time that Mozilla wasn't GPL. Now they let you choose.
What are the effects of this? Simple:
Netscape chooses their Netscape/Mozilla Public License, and can still do their binary only releases.
People developing things based on Mozilla, like the Galeon team, can treat Mozilla like any other piece of GPL code.
Releasing code with multiple licenses isn't so unusual. For example, for Perl you can choose between the GPL and the Artistic License.
There are no interactions between the different licenses, you just pick one and ignore the other(s).
Re:Mozilla Project Success; Mozilla Browser Failur
on
Mozilla Relicensing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Have you tried Mozilla recently? Since 0.9 I haven't found a serious bug, and it gets faster every release. If you think it's still too slow, try Galeon, which is Mozilla with everything non-essential stripped away.
Besides, Mozilla are the only free, complete, platform-independent browsers available (not counting thing based on Mozilla's components). Take a look at the list:
Opera: Not free
Konqueror: Tied to the KDE platform
Netscape 4.x: Not free, and buggy as hell
All the smaller browsers like Amaya lack support for one thing or the other: CSS, scripting, plugins,...
This alone is enought to ensure that Mozilla never dies.
They did think about it. This is from the appendix of the GPL:
If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this
when it starts in an interactive mode:
Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate
parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may
be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be
mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.
If they would just hand over Java to some standards body, it would immediately be promoted from 'Sun technology' to 'Industry Standard'. How they can consider this a bad thing is beyond me.
Oh, wait. If Java becomes a standard, people won't have to pay Sun anymore to be 'Java compliant'.
For years, Linux has had it's own C library. The BSD world also uses their own C libraries. There is no reason that Linux has to use glibc, that's a choice that the community has made.
For pretty much everything are non-GNU alternatives: bash can be replaced by zsh, ash or the Korn shell. All the command line tools can be taken from *BSD.
The only part of the GNU project that's vital to Linux is gcc. Linux uses lots of gcc-specific code, and a Linux port can only be done if gcc is ported first.
The reason that RMS wants it to be called GNU/Linux is because he sees it as the GNU operating system with Linux as a stopgap, to be dumped and replaced by the Hurd.
Stallman's goal for the Free Software Foundation has always been to develop the GNU operating system.
Due to a variety of reasons, the kernel of GNU (called the Hurd) is still in early beta state -- definitively not usable. So the FSF uses the Linux kernel until the Hurd gets stable.
Whether you call it Linux or GNU/Linux depends really a matter of perspective:
GNU/Linux means that you run the GNU system, and that you use the Linux as a temporary stopgap, to be dumped as soon as the Hurd is ready. (Remember that the FSF never contributed a single line of code to Linux)
Linux means that you consider Linux an operating system in its own right, independent of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.
In early versions of MS-DOS, everything related to TSRs was undocumented. People knew however that it was possible, because many standard DOS utilities (PRINT, KEYB) operated that way.
So programmers started to disassemble those programs, and they figured some of the rules out. They could make a program go resident -- but they couldn't make it stable. People liked those TSRs, so Microsoft was pretty much required to document the functions in the next release.
Before hardware vendors started to 'supply' drivers, coders in the community wrote their own.
Before hardware vendors started to 'supply' drivers, they supplied specifications and other documentation.
For example, my good old Star matrix printer came with a booklet detailling the printer 'language'. It even included sample code. If you have that, writing drivers is a piece of cake.
It seems to me that he was asked mostly pretty simple questions, questions that anyone who has any interest in law knows the answer to. In his own words:
What sort of legal problems? I asked him.
"Simple ones," he said. "Some of them are like, 'My husband is in jail for murder, and he didn't do it, and I need to file a motion for dismissal, how do I do it?'
The real lawyers quite likely answered those questions in legal mumbo-jumbo or in too much detail, so the people who asked the questions didn't understand the answers either.
He, instead, gave simple, to-the-point answers, exactly what people wanted. And as the questions were mostly pretty simple, his answers were usually correct (or not too far off).
Imagine you were asked by a complete computer newbie what kind of computer he should buy. Do you talk about whether to get a Pentium or an Athlon, different graphic boards, etc. or do you just jot down a decent configuration?
This guy did the second. He did what people wanted. And people rewarded him.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Bugroff license page:
They're just fixing an old mistake. People have been complaining for a long time that Mozilla wasn't GPL. Now they let you choose.
What are the effects of this? Simple:
Releasing code with multiple licenses isn't so unusual. For example, for Perl you can choose between the GPL and the Artistic License.
There are no interactions between the different licenses, you just pick one and ignore the other(s).
Besides, Mozilla are the only free, complete, platform-independent browsers available (not counting thing based on Mozilla's components). Take a look at the list:
This alone is enought to ensure that Mozilla never dies.
What about the Artistic license? The Python license? The Common Public License? The Sleepycat license? The Nethack General Public license?
Why did they choose just 3 licenses, when the Open Source Initiative approves of 23 licenses?
I wonder if 72% even knows what encryption means. (And that they already use it.)
Can you imagine what the effect would be if radios would play good music? People might go think for themselves! We can't have that, can we?
You disagree? Well, that's another dose of Britney Spears and 'N Sync for you!
If they would just hand over Java to some standards body, it would immediately be promoted from 'Sun technology' to 'Industry Standard'. How they can consider this a bad thing is beyond me.
Oh, wait. If Java becomes a standard, people won't have to pay Sun anymore to be 'Java compliant'.
I know about Kaffe, but I just checked www.kaffe.org and it hasn't been updated for over a year. Why has it died? Legal reasons? Lack of interest?
Japhar is another implementation, but it is in a very early stage (current version 0.10).
Do other implementations exist?
For years, Linux has had it's own C library. The BSD world also uses their own C libraries. There is no reason that Linux has to use glibc, that's a choice that the community has made.
For pretty much everything are non-GNU alternatives: bash can be replaced by zsh, ash or the Korn shell. All the command line tools can be taken from *BSD.
The only part of the GNU project that's vital to Linux is gcc. Linux uses lots of gcc-specific code, and a Linux port can only be done if gcc is ported first.
The reason that RMS wants it to be called GNU/Linux is because he sees it as the GNU operating system with Linux as a stopgap, to be dumped and replaced by the Hurd.
Stallman's goal for the Free Software Foundation has always been to develop the GNU operating system.
Due to a variety of reasons, the kernel of GNU (called the Hurd) is still in early beta state -- definitively not usable. So the FSF uses the Linux kernel until the Hurd gets stable.
Whether you call it Linux or GNU/Linux depends really a matter of perspective:
I can tell you never looked at Slashdot in Lynx.
With Windows XP and raw sockets, covering their tracks shouldn't be a problem anymore. As long as they can find their n3w l33t h4x0r warez.
I don't know what you're doing with eval, but the Perl equivalent of lambda is sub.
Try this:
$foo = sub ($) { 1+shift };
print &$foo(5)
I know this is ancient stuff, but anyway...
In early versions of MS-DOS, everything related to TSRs was undocumented. People knew however that it was possible, because many standard DOS utilities (PRINT, KEYB) operated that way.
So programmers started to disassemble those programs, and they figured some of the rules out. They could make a program go resident -- but they couldn't make it stable. People liked those TSRs, so Microsoft was pretty much required to document the functions in the next release.
In fact, I've never had problems like that with Mozilla.
Before hardware vendors started to 'supply' drivers, they supplied specifications and other documentation.
For example, my good old Star matrix printer came with a booklet detailling the printer 'language'. It even included sample code. If you have that, writing drivers is a piece of cake.
Why would you boot to Windows to run the Unix Amiga Emulator?
Do they ship the new 3.0, while they promised not to keep point releases binary compatible?
Or do they still their 2.96 "snapshot"?
... I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask some clueless questions.
* What are SSN's used for? (and for what purpose were they originally intented?)
* Why do you need to give it when buying a cell phone? Why do they need your driver's license number??? (What if you don't have one?)
When stopped being your name, address and autograph being enough?
It's not GPL. It use it's own Jabber Open Source License. At least it's approved by the Open Source Initiative.
I'm always suprised how little support the Jabber project is getting. They've done some fantastic things there.
The Jabber system can communicate with almost every IM system out there (ICQ, MSN, etc.) There's even IRC support.
Also, the whole thing is completely cross-platform. There are even clients for handhelds (http://www.jabbercentral.org/clients/).
And do I have to mention it's entirily GPL?
And I mean the sources, not the stupid setup.exe.
I don't have Windows and I don't want Windows -- I just want to take a look at the source. And I can't do anything with a setup.exe.
Is there a reason the crystal has to be external? They have put everything else on the thing...
It seems to me that he was asked mostly pretty simple questions, questions that anyone who has any interest in law knows the answer to. In his own words:
The real lawyers quite likely answered those questions in legal mumbo-jumbo or in too much detail, so the people who asked the questions didn't understand the answers either.
He, instead, gave simple, to-the-point answers, exactly what people wanted. And as the questions were mostly pretty simple, his answers were usually correct (or not too far off).
Imagine you were asked by a complete computer newbie what kind of computer he should buy. Do you talk about whether to get a Pentium or an Athlon, different graphic boards, etc. or do you just jot down a decent configuration?
This guy did the second. He did what people wanted. And people rewarded him.