Click here for a story about the Austrailian 2600 that won't take the code down. They don't just link to it, it looks like they are actually hosting it.
If an outside developer adds modules or new code to the project or even makes a whole new project based on Mozilla and they accept the terms of the GPL but not the MPL, and explicitly state their addition is GPL only, then Netscape cannot use that new code in a closed source product without permission of the author. And actually this is why some have been reluctant to add to or enhance Mozilla. Any additions by outside developer could simply be hijacked by AOL/Nescape under the MPL.
I agree. As soon as I saw this I was thinking how this would solve problems with Galeon. Until now to make Galeon work you download the entire Mozilla source from a separate site, and then compile. Now distributioning binary rpm's and deb's or whatever will be no problem. This will also resolve potential problems for Eazel and the Nautilus browser/filemanager with is going to use the gecko technology as a core. Since Eazel extends Gnome and Gnome is LGPLed and GPLed there could have been linking problems. Now nobody can say the license is Mozilla's problem. Mozilla is also getting more and more outside developers all the time. I admit, the Netscape version of Mozilla may flop, but the technology will continue to be used in various places. It already is being used in many embedded devices.
This all reminds me of the Mindcraft mess somewhat. Along those lines perhaps Postgres people should set up the Postgres system and MySQL people should set up the MySQL system. Many people are talking about how slow Postgre is but there has supposedly been a huge increase in performance with 7.0. Anyway benchmarks many times are flawed because of those who set it up usually know one system better than the other, or perhaps go as far as tilting things in somone's favor with all manner of config tricks and hardware choices. It would be nice to see a civil benchmark contest where the parties would agree on some reasonable hardware. Even in the final open Mindcraft retest with Linus and others present, Microsoft and Mindcraft got their way with really high end stuff. No tests on older hardware were allowed. Some people don't think scalability is a two way street but in it really is. Scaling down can be just as important (sometimes more) than scaling up. From the original benchmark page it looks like this test was done on higher end equipment. Who knows. Maybe MySQL would kill Postgres on a lower end K62-300 with only 128MB or ram.
It is perfectly alright for Nvidia or any hardware company to keep source to themselves. They wrote it, and as Linus himself said, "he who writes the code choses the license" or something like that. But what I really dislike is when a potential developer (supporter) of a company's hardware comes along and asks nicely to have specs, register info, programming information, protocol info, etc and the company says no. This goes for any hardware, video card, printer, scanner, whatever. They should be glad and open to anyone who wants to develop new software and add functionality to their hardware at no charge. I know what you are going to say. "But they have IP and value because there register and program info is secret." But programmer aren't asking for circuit layouts, or schematic diagrams, just software and protocol info. Nvidia has had a bit of a history playing games with open source programmers outside the company. They did release some open source code once for 3d on TNT or TNT2 or whatever, but the code was poor, not optimized, obscured, and just didn't take full advantage of the hardware. The Utah-GLX guys petitioned for specs for a while, then it looked like Nvidia might agree but nothing came of their promises. This is why many here distrust Nvidia and their so called support. As many have pointed out closed source just doesn't cut it when you are dealing with a variety of different kernels and distros, not to mention other systems like BSD, Beos, OS/2 and others. Creative released closed drivers for the SBlive at first. But it was unstable, didn't work on many platforms or certain kernels, and a host of other problems. Then they opened up the source and many of the problems disappeared. The point is Nvidia could gain much from releasing good, well documented open drivers or better yet just give out specs and let the programmers go to work for them.
I just found a link to a ZDnet story here The story says this is about the California case in which the DVD-CCA (copy and control association) is claiming misappropriation of trade secrets which has nothing to do with the DMCA or the MPAA. They are going after hundreds of defendants, not just 1 (originally 3) like the MPAA is. However it is questionable whether this STATE court will have any binding effect on defendants outside California. The DVD-CCA is the organization that is in charge of selling css decoding licenses to various hardware and software manufactures.
I know Slashdot has had test servers set up and asked people to troll away and try to crush the new server(s). Why not a Slashdot MySQL vs. PostgreSQL torture test? Invite everybody to hit two respective servers hard and see which chokes first. And also ask users to post comments on how fast the servers perform.
Some people have said that Darwin shows Apple is committed to opensource and that the APSL is an opensource license. My question is if Darwin is so open where are the mirror ftp sites of the Darwin source code. One time I thought I might play with Darwin a bit, but first the Apple site required a bunch of registration hoops. Then when I got through that I found downloading was incredibly slow from the Apple site. That is no suprise since it is the only place Darwin can be downloaded. I looked around and found that while and found mainly broken or no longer maintained mirrors of Darwin. I have read the APSL and it doesn't seem to restrict mirroring the source. Now the question is are there no mirrors because of a lack of interest of the opensource community in Darwin, or is Apple forcing mirrors down with legal threats, which would seem to be baseless? There are those that would complain about mozilla's lack of outside developers and therefore not really a community project, but I would say the whole Darwin situation is much worse and much run in a much less open manner. Even Beos is mirrored all over and it isn't even open source. There are a couple of things I would love to see happen.
1) A Darwin based distro for PPC and X86 with XFree and Gnome/KDE, mirrored all over and available from places like Cheapbytes.
2) PPC G3 and/or G4 based systems built on IBM's reference motherboard loaded with Linux or the Darwin based distro.
I know the second one is less likely to happen at least in a consumer price range, but the first could happen if developers take an interest and if Apple doesn't make life diffcult by arguing about restrictions to Darwin's distribution which just aren't there in the APSL.
I am sorry if I don't just to believe any personal account here on Slashdot. Seen to many silly claims here. Again I apologize. In some ways this whole situation just reaffirms my cynical view as you call it. Yahoo is the suppose to be the nice company that likes opensource (BSD), has been working toward IM standards etc, and here they are acting much like AOL/ICQ. I find it difficult but not impossible to believe that a company would have such a stupid policy! If you are under 18 you have to verify it with a credit card? I have heard of age verification the other way around. Oh well, as you said earlier it is too bad but I guess you should just tell your kids to lie about their age. I would rather have kids give out a bogus age than using a credit card #. Isn't it within the right of a user of a web site to protect personal info including age, especially someone under the age of 18? Doesn't disclosing age info put a child in greater danger? Just watch, pretty soon Yahoo will probably start requiring CC age verfication either way. Actually that would be more consistant and make more sense, but probably would upset many users especially if they required it every time a user want to change their personal info.
I just signed up for Yahoo mail and IM yesterday. The only things required were name and e-mail address and birthday. Anybody got a screenshot of this CC# verification? I'm sorry but most posters on Slashdot have very little credibility with me. Seems like many people around here are making up stories just to tear down a company they don't like. I am going to need more evidenc before I consider this more than just another Slashdot hoax/rumor.
If you think about it this may have an effect on almost every license based on the GPL. If the court basically ends up saying that parts of the GPL that restrict what someone can do with modified source and compiled binaries is invalid since the GPL is not a contract, that would indicate that such restrictions in other licenses are also invalid. Basically all of these licenses would be converted to a public domain or BSD type license. In fact there might be one could effect. That stupid Sun SCSL might also be declared partly invalid as well. Wouldn't it be something if Java ends up BSD or public domain. In other words there are many software developer who would not want to see a ruling against the GPL.
I always liked a file manager called DFM or the Desktop File Manager. This was an excellect complement to lite window managers like WM and Ice. Now the project doesn't seem to have a home anymore. It had been hosted on on Linuxbox with something like dfm.linuxbox.com but now linuxbox is gone and has been replaced by linuxave. AFAIK there is no dfm.linuxave.com or linuxave.com/dfm or an account on sourceforge. Does anyone have any info on what happened to DFM? This one should probably have an entry to, but I haven't tried to contact the author yet. He may still be interested, who knows. A question about this site, is it only the author who can sumbit these projects or can anyone list an unmaintained project?
here is an example and there is no indication whether or not it would work with Lesstif. Freshmeat has a number of these GPLed Motif dependent apps. Many mention the ability to use Lesstif as a replacement. A few do not. If a program doesn't compile using Lesstif then is the author violating his own license?
I wouldn't think so so I guess all the GPLed programs that use Motif would be considered illegal. Yes their are GPLed Motif based programs out there. So what allows them to get away with this and not KDE? Is it simply because of the existance of Lessif that makes this possible? I guess someone could develop an alternative implementation of qt. It woulldn't even have to work very well (like lesstif) it would just have to exist and work well enough to compile KDE. The other way out is simply for KDE developers to go Artistic or BSD (new style no ads) and be done with the GPL. In fact I have heard that with KDE v2 a number of the authors have changed the licenses on their individual programs. I don't know about KDE libs though. I wouldn't be suprised if it happens though.
Right now I only have linux installed on my home system, however I have tried FreeBSD on some other systems and I do like it. I was considering putting both FreeBSD and Linux on my home system, but I was wondering about boot loaders. I am pretty sure I can use LILO to boot FreeBSD but what about using BootEasy instead to boot both Linux and FreeBSD. I looked at the freebsd manual online and from what I gathered it looks like in order to boot Linux I have to keep LILO installed but on the boot sector of my ext2 partion instead of the MBR of the drive. Then if you install BootEasy you can choose your ext2 partion from a menu which then goes to the boot sector which which runs LILO which then in turn loads Linux. Now the thing that would be nice is if there was someway to rid myself of LILO completely and have BootEasy the linux kernel directly. My question is does version 4.0 of FreeBSD have a version of BootEasy that supports direct booting of the Linux kernel, or is LILO on the boot sector still necessary. The nice thing would to be to have a loader that could directly load any BSD or Linux without the need for LILO anywhere, and without the need to rerun LILO or any other program to update the boot sector or MBR after a kernel recompile. The loader should just go find the kernel on the partition no matter where it is. I believe this is what the GRUB loader does. One last question. After a recompile of a FreeBSD kernel, does the system require you to update BootEasy in any way or does it just read the UFS partition to find the new kernel? From what you said it sounds like it does the second which is a nicer solution. As I said it would be great if BootEasy could do this with a ext2 partition and Linux kernel as well.
Only public domain and perhaps BSD are not proprietary then. At least according to his definitions. Even though GPL has a great many rules to follow, I still think it is not proprietary. You can fork GPL products contrary to popular believe and there are situations where a fork of GPL project might be even be considered necessary. What if a GPL project is first released by a single author, and initially has no outside contribution other than suggestions for bug fixes etc, no code? Then the author as the only contributor and owner has the right to change the license. This has happened with some products such as WWWThreads, IglooFTP, Jazz++, etc. But the original GPL code can remain out there and in fact the original author is suppose to keep an older GPL version available for something like 2 years on ftp. In any case, mirrors can keep the code available indefinitely. Other interested developers can at any time start developing a free version with new features so long as this new fork is released under GPL. Now this raises an interesting question. Can the original other then grab modifications in this fork and integrate them into his new proprietary version? I don't believe so. The author may retain ownership of the orginal but the GPL does not automatically extend ownership to all derived works. The derived work mentioned in the above example would be owned by both the original author and the new author of the fork and as such, could only have the license changed if both parties agreed to change it. This is where licenses like MPL, QPL etc are different. If you fork the code the original you have to release your changes, but the original author has every right to intergrate the code into proprietary products. Even so I would say that while the Netscape branded browser could be considered proprietary, the source code behind it Mozilla isn't. Linux is definitely not proprietary even if you slap hundreds of proprierary products and drivers in a box with it.
Also, you don't even have to be open source to be considered non-proprietary. All you have to do is open the specification. For example OpenGL is not proprietary. The spec is there for everyone to see. Even if SGI doesn't release all their source code it still is open enough that effective clones do exist. In closing my definition of proprietary would go something like this, any technology that can only be cloned, copied or otherwise implemented throught the use of reverse engineering and guess-work is proprietary. To clone or emulate Linux you would not need to reverse engineer anything. In fact as an example look at FreeBSD's emulation of Linux. Some say it is very stable and runs Linux apps faster than Linux. I don't think this would be possible is Linux was closed in any way. Windows is still proprietary even though Wine exists because Wine is certainly not an effective replacement for Windows. The work by wine developers has involved reverse engineering to figure out all the un-documented API calls.
Excuse me IANAL but if I understand copyright correctly once a particular verison of something has been released under a particular copyright then the copyright continues to be valid as long as the user abides by the terms the original author had stated. I can use old freeware copies of say Homesite software for web-authoring for example for as long as I like. Just because it was purchased by Allaire doesn't mean copyright on previous verisions ceases. I am sure there are many instances of freeware being bought out and made commercial. I have yet to hear an instance of previous free versions being called illegal warez.
Here is another I-Opener hack. You can now boot linux from the flash memory instead of disk. The problem is you still need a disk and cable to make the initial transfer. Check it out here.
If the threat of being TOSed off the service is the best they can do they better think again. Getting TOSed would actually be considered a good thing. You are then free from the service. No more 21.95/mo payments. They could require someone buying a new unit to sign up for 3 years of service. This raises an interesting question. I was wondering what does MSN, Compuserve do if you violate TOS but you have a 3 year contract? Do you prepay? I didn't think this was the case. Do they disconnect you and continue to charge you every month? Sounds illegal to get charged for a service you no longer get access to. Do they send you a bill for the remaining amount of time on the contract? This would be the most likely. If you are a few months in to your service and they throw you out for p0rn, wareZ, decss or whatever I suspect that in some states it would be within their right to not only terminate the account, but also charge you a bill for say $21/mo * 30months or $630!!!!
Well, I was kind of expecting a "no" on the part of my question about public NFS, but I am very glad to hear that FTP install is in development and will be out eventually. I am also glad to here that packages will have more descriptive names for better upgradability and installation. Slackware seems to be getting better and better.
Again, thanks to Patrick V. for an excellent distribution and for taking the time to answer these questions.
What if you have a bare system with no operating system on it and you don't want to bother installing DOS/WIN on it just to use Slackware? What if the system doesn't even have a CD-ROM? The only real option then is a network installation. That means either using FTP or NFS. Ok now what if you don't have access to your own NFS server and don't have a machine that can be set up as one? I know that this is an unlikely set of conditions but the situation can come up. I am not suggesting dumping NFS for FTP but I do think that both options should be available or else open NFS servers should be widely available. I also realize that there are security issues surrounding NFS2/3 which is why NFS is usually not left up and running for long periods with anonymous logins available. This is why FTP is the more likely choice. One last problem with downloading the packages to a Win/DOS partition. How am I suppose to know what to download before the install starts? If the answer is GET EVERYTHING! my reply would be I have a fast network but not that fast. A minimalist ftp install of FreeBSD can take up under 100Megs. That is a lot less than 600Megs, 500 of which I may not need. I am guessing that all Slackware binaries for 7.0 take up several hundred megs.
OK enough explanations I just think their should be more options -- isn't linux about options?
BTW, otherwise I think Slackware is a great distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
... programming languages.
Click here for a story about the Austrailian 2600 that won't take the code down. They don't just link to it, it looks like they are actually hosting it.
If an outside developer adds modules or new code to the project or even makes a whole new project based on Mozilla and they accept the terms of the GPL but not the MPL, and explicitly state their addition is GPL only, then Netscape cannot use that new code in a closed source product without permission of the author. And actually this is why some have been reluctant to add to or enhance Mozilla. Any additions by outside developer could simply be hijacked by AOL/Nescape under the MPL.
I agree. As soon as I saw this I was thinking how this would solve problems with Galeon. Until now to make Galeon work you download the entire Mozilla source from a separate site, and then compile. Now distributioning binary rpm's and deb's or whatever will be no problem. This will also resolve potential problems for Eazel and the Nautilus browser/filemanager with is going to use the gecko technology as a core. Since Eazel extends Gnome and Gnome is LGPLed and GPLed there could have been linking problems. Now nobody can say the license is Mozilla's problem. Mozilla is also getting more and more outside developers all the time. I admit, the Netscape version of Mozilla may flop, but the technology will continue to be used in various places. It already is being used in many embedded devices.
This all reminds me of the Mindcraft mess somewhat. Along those lines perhaps Postgres people should set up the Postgres system and MySQL people should set up the MySQL system. Many people are talking about how slow Postgre is but there has supposedly been a huge increase in performance with 7.0. Anyway benchmarks many times are flawed because of those who set it up usually know one system better than the other, or perhaps go as far as tilting things in somone's favor with all manner of config tricks and hardware choices. It would be nice to see a civil benchmark contest where the parties would agree on some reasonable hardware. Even in the final open Mindcraft retest with Linus and others present, Microsoft and Mindcraft got their way with really high end stuff. No tests on older hardware were allowed. Some people don't think scalability is a two way street but in it really is. Scaling down can be just as important (sometimes more) than scaling up. From the original benchmark page it looks like this test was done on higher end equipment. Who knows. Maybe MySQL would kill Postgres on a lower end K62-300 with only 128MB or ram.
is a great idea. See how well a Slashdot test server holds up when running Postgres.
It is perfectly alright for Nvidia or any hardware company to keep source to themselves. They wrote it, and as Linus himself said, "he who writes the code choses the license" or something like that. But what I really dislike is when a potential developer (supporter) of a company's hardware comes along and asks nicely to have specs, register info, programming information, protocol info, etc and the company says no. This goes for any hardware, video card, printer, scanner, whatever. They should be glad and open to anyone who wants to develop new software and add functionality to their hardware at no charge. I know what you are going to say. "But they have IP and value because there register and program info is secret." But programmer aren't asking for circuit layouts, or schematic diagrams, just software and protocol info. Nvidia has had a bit of a history playing games with open source programmers outside the company. They did release some open source code once for 3d on TNT or TNT2 or whatever, but the code was poor, not optimized, obscured, and just didn't take full advantage of the hardware. The Utah-GLX guys petitioned for specs for a while, then it looked like Nvidia might agree but nothing came of their promises. This is why many here distrust Nvidia and their so called support. As many have pointed out closed source just doesn't cut it when you are dealing with a variety of different kernels and distros, not to mention other systems like BSD, Beos, OS/2 and others. Creative released closed drivers for the SBlive at first. But it was unstable, didn't work on many platforms or certain kernels, and a host of other problems. Then they opened up the source and many of the problems disappeared. The point is Nvidia could gain much from releasing good, well documented open drivers or better yet just give out specs and let the programmers go to work for them.
Click here for a recent Cnet story on how the MPAA doesn't have any evidence of pirating.
I just found a link to a ZDnet story here
The story says this is about the California case in which the DVD-CCA (copy and control association) is claiming misappropriation of trade secrets which has nothing to do with the DMCA or the MPAA. They are going after hundreds of defendants, not just 1 (originally 3) like the MPAA is. However it is questionable whether this STATE court will have any binding effect on defendants outside California. The DVD-CCA is the organization that is in charge of selling css decoding licenses to various hardware and software manufactures.
I know Slashdot has had test servers set up and asked people to troll away and try to crush the new server(s). Why not a Slashdot MySQL vs. PostgreSQL torture test? Invite everybody to hit two respective servers hard and see which chokes first. And also ask users to post comments on how fast the servers perform.
Some people have said that Darwin shows Apple is committed to opensource and that the APSL is an opensource license. My question is if Darwin is so open where are the mirror ftp sites of the Darwin source code. One time I thought I might play with Darwin a bit, but first the Apple site required a bunch of registration hoops. Then when I got through that I found downloading was incredibly slow from the Apple site. That is no suprise since it is the only place Darwin can be downloaded. I looked around and found that while and found mainly broken or no longer maintained mirrors of Darwin. I have read the APSL and it doesn't seem to restrict mirroring the source. Now the question is are there no mirrors because of a lack of interest of the opensource community in Darwin, or is Apple forcing mirrors down with legal threats, which would seem to be baseless? There are those that would complain about mozilla's lack of outside developers and therefore not really a community project, but I would say the whole Darwin situation is much worse and much run in a much less open manner. Even Beos is mirrored all over and it isn't even open source. There are a couple of things I would love to see happen.
1) A Darwin based distro for PPC and X86 with XFree and Gnome/KDE, mirrored all over and available from places like Cheapbytes.
2) PPC G3 and/or G4 based systems built on IBM's reference motherboard loaded with Linux or the Darwin based distro.
I know the second one is less likely to happen at least in a consumer price range, but the first could happen if developers take an interest and if Apple doesn't make life diffcult by arguing about restrictions to Darwin's distribution which just aren't there in the APSL.
I am sorry if I don't just to believe any personal account here on Slashdot. Seen to many silly claims here. Again I apologize. In some ways this whole situation just reaffirms my cynical view as you call it. Yahoo is the suppose to be the nice company that likes opensource (BSD), has been working toward IM standards etc, and here they are acting much like AOL/ICQ. I find it difficult but not impossible to believe that a company would have such a stupid policy! If you are under 18 you have to verify it with a credit card? I have heard of age verification the other way around. Oh well, as you said earlier it is too bad but I guess you should just tell your kids to lie about their age. I would rather have kids give out a bogus age than using a credit card #. Isn't it within the right of a user of a web site to protect personal info including age, especially someone under the age of 18? Doesn't disclosing age info put a child in greater danger? Just watch, pretty soon Yahoo will probably start requiring CC age verfication either way. Actually that would be more consistant and make more sense, but probably would upset many users especially if they required it every time a user want to change their personal info.
I just signed up for Yahoo mail and IM yesterday. The only things required were name and e-mail address and birthday. Anybody got a screenshot of this CC# verification? I'm sorry but most posters on Slashdot have very little credibility with me. Seems like many people around here are making up stories just to tear down a company they don't like. I am going to need more evidenc before I consider this more than just another Slashdot hoax/rumor.
If you think about it this may have an effect on almost every license based on the GPL. If the court basically ends up saying that parts of the GPL that restrict what someone can do with modified source and compiled binaries is invalid since the GPL is not a contract, that would indicate that such restrictions in other licenses are also invalid. Basically all of these licenses would be converted to a public domain or BSD type license. In fact there might be one could effect. That stupid Sun SCSL might also be declared partly invalid as well. Wouldn't it be something if Java ends up BSD or public domain. In other words there are many software developer who would not want to see a ruling against the GPL.
I always liked a file manager called DFM or the Desktop File Manager. This was an excellect complement to lite window managers like WM and Ice. Now the project doesn't seem to have a home anymore. It had been hosted on on Linuxbox with something like dfm.linuxbox.com but now linuxbox is gone and has been replaced by linuxave. AFAIK there is no dfm.linuxave.com or linuxave.com/dfm or an account on sourceforge. Does anyone have any info on what happened to DFM? This one should probably have an entry to, but I haven't tried to contact the author yet. He may still be interested, who knows. A question about this site, is it only the author who can sumbit these projects or can anyone list an unmaintained project?
here is an example
and there is no indication whether or not it would work with Lesstif. Freshmeat has a number of these GPLed Motif dependent apps. Many mention the ability to use Lesstif as a replacement. A few do not. If a program doesn't compile using Lesstif then is the author violating his own license?
I wouldn't think so so I guess all the GPLed programs that use Motif would be considered illegal. Yes their are GPLed Motif based programs out there. So what allows them to get away with this and not KDE? Is it simply because of the existance of Lessif that makes this possible? I guess someone could develop an alternative implementation of qt. It woulldn't even have to work very well (like lesstif) it would just have to exist and work well enough to compile KDE. The other way out is simply for KDE developers to go Artistic or BSD (new style no ads) and be done with the GPL. In fact I have heard that with KDE v2 a number of the authors have changed the licenses on their individual programs. I don't know about KDE libs though. I wouldn't be suprised if it happens though.
Does this mean that GPLed Motif based programs would be considered illegal? If so I believe there are a few of these illegal programs out there!
Right now I only have linux installed on my home system, however I have tried FreeBSD on some other systems and I do like it. I was considering putting both FreeBSD and Linux on my home system, but I was wondering about boot loaders. I am pretty sure I can use LILO to boot FreeBSD but what about using BootEasy instead to boot both Linux and FreeBSD. I looked at the freebsd manual online and from what I gathered it looks like in order to boot Linux I have to keep LILO installed but on the boot sector of my ext2 partion instead of the MBR of the drive. Then if you install BootEasy you can choose your ext2 partion from a menu which then goes to the boot sector which which runs LILO which then in turn loads Linux. Now the thing that would be nice is if there was someway to rid myself of LILO completely and have BootEasy the linux kernel directly. My question is does version 4.0 of FreeBSD have a version of BootEasy that supports direct booting of the Linux kernel, or is LILO on the boot sector still necessary. The nice thing would to be to have a loader that could directly load any BSD or Linux without the need for LILO anywhere, and without the need to rerun LILO or any other program to update the boot sector or MBR after a kernel recompile. The loader should just go find the kernel on the partition no matter where it is. I believe this is what the GRUB loader does. One last question. After a recompile of a FreeBSD kernel, does the system require you to update BootEasy in any way or does it just read the UFS partition to find the new kernel? From what you said it sounds like it does the second which is a nicer solution. As I said it would be great if BootEasy could do this with a ext2 partition and Linux kernel as well.
Only public domain and perhaps BSD are not proprietary then. At least according to his definitions. Even though GPL has a great many rules to follow, I still think it is not proprietary. You can fork GPL products contrary to popular believe and there are situations where a fork of GPL project might be even be considered necessary. What if a GPL project is first released by a single author, and initially has no outside contribution other than suggestions for bug fixes etc, no code? Then the author as the only contributor and owner has the right to change the license. This has happened with some products such as WWWThreads, IglooFTP, Jazz++, etc. But the original GPL code can remain out there and in fact the original author is suppose to keep an older GPL version available for something like 2 years on ftp. In any case, mirrors can keep the code available indefinitely. Other interested developers can at any time start developing a free version with new features so long as this new fork is released under GPL. Now this raises an interesting question. Can the original other then grab modifications in this fork and integrate them into his new proprietary version? I don't believe so. The author may retain ownership of the orginal but the GPL does not automatically extend ownership to all derived works. The derived work mentioned in the above example would be owned by both the original author and the new author of the fork and as such, could only have the license changed if both parties agreed to change it. This is where licenses like MPL, QPL etc are different. If you fork the code the original you have to release your changes, but the original author has every right to intergrate the code into proprietary products. Even so I would say that while the Netscape branded browser could be considered proprietary, the source code behind it Mozilla isn't. Linux is definitely not proprietary even if you slap hundreds of proprierary products and drivers in a box with it.
Also, you don't even have to be open source to be considered non-proprietary. All you have to do is open the specification. For example OpenGL is not proprietary. The spec is there for everyone to see. Even if SGI doesn't release all their source code it still is open enough that effective clones do exist. In closing my definition of proprietary would go something like this, any technology that can only be cloned, copied or otherwise implemented throught the use of reverse engineering and guess-work is proprietary. To clone or emulate Linux you would not need to reverse engineer anything. In fact as an example look at FreeBSD's emulation of Linux. Some say it is very stable and runs Linux apps faster than Linux. I don't think this would be possible is Linux was closed in any way. Windows is still proprietary even though Wine exists because Wine is certainly not an effective replacement for Windows. The work by wine developers has involved reverse engineering to figure out all the un-documented API calls.
Anyway enough said, probably too much.
KJ
Excuse me IANAL but if I understand copyright correctly once a particular verison of something has been released under a particular copyright then the copyright continues to be valid as long as the user abides by the terms the original author had stated. I can use old freeware copies of say Homesite software for web-authoring for example for as long as I like. Just because it was purchased by Allaire doesn't mean copyright on previous verisions ceases. I am sure there are many instances of freeware being bought out and made commercial. I have yet to hear an instance of previous free versions being called illegal warez.
Here is another I-Opener hack. You can now boot linux from the flash memory instead of disk. The problem is you still need a disk and cable to make the initial transfer. Check it out here.
If the threat of being TOSed off the service is the best they can do they better think again. Getting TOSed would actually be considered a good thing. You are then free from the service. No more 21.95/mo payments. They could require someone buying a new unit to sign up for 3 years of service. This raises an interesting question. I was wondering what does MSN, Compuserve do if you violate TOS but you have a 3 year contract? Do you prepay? I didn't think this was the case. Do they disconnect you and continue to charge you every month? Sounds illegal to get charged for a service you no longer get access to. Do they send you a bill for the remaining amount of time on the contract? This would be the most likely. If you are a few months in to your service and they throw you out for p0rn, wareZ, decss or whatever I suspect that in some states it would be within their right to not only terminate the account, but also charge you a bill for say $21/mo * 30months or $630!!!!
Well, I was kind of expecting a "no" on the part of my question about public NFS, but I am very glad to hear that FTP install is in development and will be out eventually. I am also glad to here that packages will have more descriptive names for better upgradability and installation. Slackware seems to be getting better and better.
Again, thanks to Patrick V. for an excellent distribution and for taking the time to answer these questions.
What if you have a bare system with no operating system on it and you don't want to bother installing DOS/WIN on it just to use Slackware? What if the system doesn't even have a CD-ROM? The only real option then is a network installation. That means either using FTP or NFS. Ok now what if you don't have access to your own NFS server and don't have a machine that can be set up as one? I know that this is an unlikely set of conditions but the situation can come up. I am not suggesting dumping NFS for FTP but I do think that both options should be available or else open NFS servers should be widely available. I also realize that there are security issues surrounding NFS2/3 which is why NFS is usually not left up and running for long periods with anonymous logins available. This is why FTP is the more likely choice. One last problem with downloading the packages to a Win/DOS partition. How am I suppose to know what to download before the install starts? If the answer is GET EVERYTHING! my reply would be I have a fast network but not that fast. A minimalist ftp install of FreeBSD can take up under 100Megs. That is a lot less than 600Megs, 500 of which I may not need. I am guessing that all Slackware binaries for 7.0 take up several hundred megs.
OK enough explanations I just think their should be more options -- isn't linux about options?
BTW, otherwise I think Slackware is a great distribution.