I kind feel that the BSD license is more defined - when someone says "BSD", there's some text to go along with that. If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.
> Did I say it would be bad?
Touche! I had placed myself on the defensive already, my apologies.
> Saying to public domain the code is > simpler and clearer.
I'm surprised to hear you say that; I guess I feel the opposite way - that a BSD license is simpler and clearer.
...as my email/contact/calendar/task thingy (OK, PIM) on various Fedora Core releases for the past few years; it's steadily improved and now is quite solid.
Of course, I'm probably biased since I'm working on a Ruby wrapper library for it, but, anyhow.
> they can contribute their code with a > BSD or even public domain licence
Right, but I think their concern is that they may "contaminate" themselves by looking at the GPL'd code. You know, it's like looking at CDDL'd code; if those ideas show up in your own code later and someone traces it back, bad times. Better to just stand clear, you know?
True! There's a tradeoff there though - how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL? I'd rather give those folks a safe way to contribute, and I've got zero interest in tracking down GPL violators.
And it seems to be working out well - check the contributors page. Most of the real interesting stuff in PMD has come from other folks... like the data flow analysis stuff, for example. I want to avoid any chance of scaring away those folks...
Reducing the license count is good, but put those apps under the BSD license instead. That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied. They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program. I've had folks send in contributions to PMD and say that if it was GPL'd they wouldn't be contributing their code.
And the fact that Compuware wraps PMD and calls it OptimalAdvisor? More power to them! Maybe they'll contribute a bug fix or two, and maybe I'll sell a couple more copies of the book. A rising tide, as it were...
> it's more a mimicing of intelligence and > not very impressive mimicing
So true. I remember watching a video of the "Lord of the Rings" game and hearing the game producer saying "Look at this! The characters have actual feelings and personalities - they're actually happy about winning this battle!"
Come on, fellas. Don't mistake state tables and switch statements for feelings and personalities and intelligence. It's OK to be enthusiastic, but don't believe your own marketing materials.
> he is saying that up to the present > there has been no policy of attacking staellites
Right. But I think "up to the present" isn't quite as long a period of time as I felt like his use of "the history of warfare" implied. Perhaps "the history of modern warfare" or "in the history of space travel" would have been less... I dunno... evocative. Or something.
> to illustrate that things change, to point > out that there will likely be no turning > back once we launch down this road and that > the people most likely to suffer are the > civilians.
Hm. I kind of agree... sure, war tech moves onwards, and no one's going back to bows and arrows now that the machine gun is here.
> a gross mischaracterization of what > is actually being said.
I disagree. To me it sounded as if he was invoking "the history of warfare" as if there was a long and august tradition of not attacking satellites, stretching back over the annals of time. There's not; it's just that satellites haven't been around very long and they haven't been worth attacking. As soon as they are and there's a country that think it's worth the trouble, it'll happen.
> buying a "Beat Ms. Pacman" strategy guide > in elementary school
Nice, those were hard-earned dollars, I daresay. $5 for cutting the neighbor's lawn and all that.
My sad elementary school experiences involved accidentally overwriting a brand new game while trying to back it up on a TRS-80 Model III. Oh the agony...
Writing a Pacman clone is a great exercise if you're trying to learn how to program games. There's graphics, hit detection, path-finding, "AI" strategy, high score tracking; all kinds of good stuff to think about.
Another good one is Tetris; lots of interesting challenges in there.
Programming Challenges is a nifty book by Steven Skiena and Miguel Revilla. It's a selection of problems from the Online-Judge problem set. There's a lot of nifty stuff in there - sorting, graph theory, number theory, etc.
Best of all, when folks solve the problems, they can submit their solutions online to see if they pass muster!
Slashdot Mirror
> the original source code without the
> comment would be public domain.
Gotcha, OK, yup, that makes sense. Thanks!
Very interesting, I hadn't seen that distinction before, thanks!
> Anybody can do anything they want
:-)
> with it without fear.
Except remove it from the public domain, I daresay?
> I wouldn't say that public
> domain isn't a known quantity.
I should have said "it's an unknown quantity _to me_"
> why don't you suggest public domain?
I kind feel that the BSD license is more defined - when someone says "BSD", there's some text to go along with that. If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.
> Did I say it would be bad?
Touche! I had placed myself on the defensive already, my apologies.
> Saying to public domain the code is
> simpler and clearer.
I'm surprised to hear you say that; I guess I feel the opposite way - that a BSD license is simpler and clearer.
...as my email/contact/calendar/task thingy (OK, PIM) on various Fedora Core releases for the past few years; it's steadily improved and now is quite solid.
Of course, I'm probably biased since I'm working on a Ruby wrapper library for it, but, anyhow.
> I am absolutely baffled why anyone
> promotes the BSD
Because it allows folks to use/wrap/copy the code with having to open source their code.
> Why don't you come right out and say you
> want programmers to throw their code into
> the public domain?
Why would that be bad?
> they can contribute their code with a
> BSD or even public domain licence
Right, but I think their concern is that they may "contaminate" themselves by looking at the GPL'd code. You know, it's like looking at CDDL'd code; if those ideas show up in your own code later and someone traces it back, bad times. Better to just stand clear, you know?
> It's called leeching.
...
True! There's a tradeoff there though - how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL? I'd rather give those folks a safe way to contribute, and I've got zero interest in tracking down GPL violators.
And it seems to be working out well - check the contributors page. Most of the real interesting stuff in PMD has come from other folks... like the data flow analysis stuff, for example. I want to avoid any chance of scaring away those folks
Reducing the license count is good, but put those apps under the BSD license instead. That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied. They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program. I've had folks send in contributions to PMD and say that if it was GPL'd they wouldn't be contributing their code.
And the fact that Compuware wraps PMD and calls it OptimalAdvisor? More power to them! Maybe they'll contribute a bug fix or two, and maybe I'll sell a couple more copies of the book. A rising tide, as it were...
...and the bandwidth is usually pretty good; here's their collection.
Thank you!
> it's more a mimicing of intelligence and
> not very impressive mimicing
So true. I remember watching a video of the "Lord of the Rings" game and hearing the game producer saying "Look at this! The characters have actual feelings and personalities - they're actually happy about winning this battle!"
Come on, fellas. Don't mistake state tables and switch statements for feelings and personalities and intelligence. It's OK to be enthusiastic, but don't believe your own marketing materials.
...is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming. It's got all sorts of predator/prey and pathfinding stuff in there.
The code examples are in C, although I ported some of them from the 1st edition of the book to Ruby.
...is a pretty savvy fellow; he's a frequent LKML poster and has gotten some mentions on Kernel Traffic.
> he is saying that up to the present
> there has been no policy of attacking staellites
Right. But I think "up to the present" isn't quite as long a period of time as I felt like his use of "the history of warfare" implied. Perhaps "the history of modern warfare" or "in the history of space travel" would have been less... I dunno... evocative. Or something.
> to illustrate that things change, to point
> out that there will likely be no turning
> back once we launch down this road and that
> the people most likely to suffer are the
> civilians.
Hm. I kind of agree... sure, war tech moves onwards, and no one's going back to bows and arrows now that the machine gun is here.
> a gross mischaracterization of what
> is actually being said.
I disagree. To me it sounded as if he was invoking "the history of warfare" as if there was a long and august tradition of not attacking satellites, stretching back over the annals of time. There's not; it's just that satellites haven't been around very long and they haven't been worth attacking. As soon as they are and there's a country that think it's worth the trouble, it'll happen.
Cool! Yup, lots of different ways to approach the shapes, and the animation or whatever that happens when you fill a row, and so on. Good times.
> buying a "Beat Ms. Pacman" strategy guide
> in elementary school
Nice, those were hard-earned dollars, I daresay. $5 for cutting the neighbor's lawn and all that.
My sad elementary school experiences involved accidentally overwriting a brand new game while trying to back it up on a TRS-80 Model III. Oh the agony...
> ghosts in Pacman followed predetermined paths
You're probably right, so a true clone wouldn't need an AI strategy.
I guess I was thinking of what someone would do who was writing a version of Pacman today and that came to mind...
Writing a Pacman clone is a great exercise if you're trying to learn how to program games. There's graphics, hit detection, path-finding, "AI" strategy, high score tracking; all kinds of good stuff to think about.
Another good one is Tetris; lots of interesting challenges in there.
Programming Challenges is a nifty book by Steven Skiena and Miguel Revilla. It's a selection of problems from the Online-Judge problem set. There's a lot of nifty stuff in there - sorting, graph theory, number theory, etc.
Best of all, when folks solve the problems, they can submit their solutions online to see if they pass muster!
Cool, I'm on 1.0.4, I should upgrade...
...is a pretty impressive series of Flash movies, although I had to resort to IE to get it to work nicely.
> average, fully debugged (i.e. perfect,
> averaged over time), fully loaded
> (meetings, requirements, testing, etc. etc. etc.).
Wow. Well, interesting stuff, thanks for the post!
tom