Or is the next version of QT supposed to be Open Source?
Qt 2.0 will be released under the QPL 1.0 which is a DFSG-free / Open Source license. ( development snapshots are already available licensed under the QPL)
The QPL 1.0 is however incompatible with the GPL (Debian's analysis still holds for QPL 1.0). Thus, to redistribute binaries, an exception clause is needed like pi-address has:
Additionally, you are granted permission to assume, for the purposes of distributing this program in object code or executable form under Section 3 of the GNU Public License, that the QT library is normally distributed with the major components of the operating system on which the executable or object code runs.
The KDE developers are reportedly preparing a different license change that will resolve this conflict.
Turing was an outsider during his life, and unfortunately still seems to be.
To those who are not familiar with his contributions to computing and codebreaking, I'd strongly recommend the biography by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma.
What could the possible advantage be to introducing yet another compiler name?
gcc3 isn't going to be the name of the compiler driver executable, but of the compiler itself, just as the current gcc is gcc release 2.
EGCS currently internally identifies itself as gcc 2 (e.g. gcc version egcs-2.91.66 Debian GNU/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release) ), but it contains many improvements compared to FSF gcc 2.8.x that together IMHO justify bumping its version number to gcc 3.
The concept of "porting" GCC to something so different from current 32-bit machines as IA64 is going to be a major strain on the backend. Getting performance to even the current GCC standard (ie good but not best-in-class) will take at least a couple o years once hardware is available.
Why? EGCS (the next gcc) already supports several 64-bit architectures like Alpha and UltraSparc, and incorporates the Haifa scheduler which can be a big performance boost.
Most GPL-ed programs are licensed like this (emphasis mine): This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. So if you want to use it under the GPLv3, you can do so.
If Linus really wanted to change the license from v2 to v3, he'd have to get the permission of the other copyright holders to the kernel.
The problem with this strategy is that SCO is thus placing itself in a market that strongly prefers free software, without offering much additional value in their proprietary products.
Either SCO will wake up and smell the roses, or it will soon feed the roses.
The page says This 3-day course will cover the practical aspects of installing LINUX and the configuration of network services. LINUX kernel compilation and 'public domain' software installation will also be included.
I'm willing to overlook the incorrect capitalisation of "Linux". But I strongly suspect they're using "public domain" wrongly.
To quote "Categories of Free and Non-Free Software" ( link): Public domain software is software that is not copyrighted. It is a special case of non-copylefted free software, which means that some copies or modified versions may not be free at all. Sometimes people use the term ``public domain'' in a loose fashion to mean ``free'' or ``available gratis.'' However, ``public domain'' is a legal term and means, precisely, ``not copyrighted''. For clarity, we recommend using ``public domain'' for that meaning only, and using other terms to convey the other meanings.
Ever read John Brunner's novel Stand On Zanzibar? That book scares me.
SoZ is actually optimistic when you compare it to his The Jagged Orbit (in which people are scared to death of having to leave their houses) and The Sheep Look Up (the Dutch cover blurb described it as "a country being destroyed by pollution; environmental, political, social, personal"), both of which are eerily similar to aspects of our society.
Other dystopias this thread reminds me of are A Clockwork Orange's meaningless violence, and Fahrenheit 451 (what happens to a society that acts on the censorship cries).
Or, more honestly, does the Internet make things like this easier for people? What about socialization of people?
IMO, the biggest impact the internet has in terms of socialisation is that it strongly reduces the influcence your physical location (e.g. the country you grow up in) on your culture. It allows you to communicate with kindred spirits all over the globe.
But this isn't the global village where we're all in the same vanilla culture. It's a bazaar in which just about everyone can find the cultural niches they belong to (SF fandom, taoism, wicca, Linux, cartoons, bikers, classical philosophy etc. etc.)
This can be a great thing, but it can also be very bad, as a means of spreading memes like racism, self-destructive religious cultism etc.
The internet is a technology that is changing communication. It is not inherently good, nor inherently evil. It is not "the medium is the message". It is the medium in which all messages can be found.
It is our individual responsibility to learn and to teach how to use this technology for good.
A few weeks ago there was a link here on slashdot to a long essay about how newbies should avoid Debian, and how the Debian community should be for advanced users who, if I remember correctly, have "mastered Slackware".
Debian has always focussed on doing the right thing in technical manners. Many of its developers are long-time UN*X and Linux users, who go for flexibility and power, and are less likely to suffer from user unfriendliness. This doesn't make Debian inherently user-unfriendly. Debian is about open development. If you care about user friendliness in Debian, you're more than welcom to help out.
There are many differences, many of which are difficult to classify in a better/worse way.
Development model. Red Hat is produced by a fairly small group of developers working for a company. Debian is produced by several hundreds of volunteers.
Support model. Red Hat offers commercial support. Debian does not offer commercial support (only high-quality free support; commercial support is available from consultants
"contrib". Debian has no equivalent to Red Hat's "contrib" section (i.e. user-contributed binaries). People who want to contribute to Debian simply become developers.
Packaging format. Debian has.deb; Red Hat has RPM. Joey Hess, the author of the alien package converter, has a technical comparison between various packaging formats.
Hopefully, this will be an incentive for KDE to work towards resolving the licensing issue so that the regular Debian distribution can offer KDE. Although there will soon be a DFSG-free Qt (under the QPL), the incompatibility between the GPL and Qt's license (see Debian's analysis) persists with a QPL-licensed Qt.
Does this solve the glibc 2.1 problem?
on
egcs to become gcc
·
· Score: 1
I assume that this will expedite the (re)release of glibc 2.1? (Or has it been released already - I haven't bothered to check).
This should solve the "political issue" indeed. glibc2.1 isn't on ftp.gnu.org yet, but then again, there hasn't been an official announcement from the FSF blessing EGCS as the one true gcc yet.
Quoting the announcement of the EGCS Chill frontend:
Chill is the "CCITT High-Level Language", where CCITT is the old name for what is now ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. It is is language in the Modula2 family, and targets many of the same applications as Ada (especially large embedded systems). Chill was never used much in the United States, but is still being used in Europe, Brazil, Korea, and other places.
The primary difference is the development model. EGCS is bazaar-style, whereas FSF gcc's was cathedral-styl e.
What this meant in practice, was that EGCS advanced rapidly, and has succeeded in reintegrating most of the separate GCC development communities (C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Pentium optimisations) with major improvements (Haifa scheduler, integrated testsuite, much closer to C++ standard).
As one of the co-maintainers of the Debian EGCS packages, I'm extremely happy about this. I've found the EGCS developers quite responsive about bug reports, and often found bugs in release versions to be fixed in snapshots already.
Filtering / censoring / blocking / killfile / scorefile software are tools. In my opinion, like all tools, they are not evils in and of themselves, but can be bad if people use them wrongly (or are not given a choice not to use them): censorware doesn't censor people, people censor people.
I use these tools as a means of dealing with information overload. Take ACs for instance. Yes, perhaps that one anonymous coward in a hundred has something sensible to say, but the signal to noise ratio of AC comments makes it too expensive time-wise for me to look at it. Hopefully, a moderator will pick it up and put it in the plus-scores.
This is no different than the way we read a newspaper (by skipping most of it) and judge books by their covers or publisher blurbs. In an ideal world, we'd be immortal and have the time not to have to rely on such crude ways of sorting. But in the real world, time is limited, and this type of software can be used as a tool for using that limited time more efficiently.
This is good news. Let's hope Logitech will apply for Open Hardware certification for these controllers. Open Hardware is a good initiative that unfortunately hasn't received much attention so far.
Debian is made by it's developers. The Debian project isn't a formal legal entity, but a self-organising group of volunteers under the Debian constitution.
SPI was orginally created as a legal entity to foster Debian development (e.g. for companies to have something to donate equipment and money to). SPI nowadays supports other free software development projects besides Debian.
One of Debian's goals is to provide a good basis to base other distributions on.
What makes this great IMO is that Corel has the guts not to take the easy way and join up with a company, but has genuinely listened to its techies, and chosen to cooperate with a bazaar organisation.
Slashdot Mirror
Qt 2.0 will be released under the QPL 1.0 which is a DFSG-free / Open Source license. ( development snapshots are already available licensed under the QPL)
The QPL 1.0 is however incompatible with the GPL (Debian's analysis still holds for QPL 1.0). Thus, to redistribute binaries, an exception clause is needed like pi-address has:
The KDE developers are reportedly preparing a different license change that will resolve this conflict.
To those who are not familiar with his contributions to computing and codebreaking, I'd strongly recommend the biography by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma.
gcc3 isn't going to be the name of the compiler driver executable, but of the compiler itself, just as the current gcc is gcc release 2.
EGCS currently internally identifies itself as gcc 2 (e.g.
gcc version egcs-2.91.66 Debian GNU/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)
), but it contains many improvements compared to FSF gcc 2.8.x that together IMHO justify bumping its version number to gcc 3.
Why? EGCS (the next gcc) already supports several 64-bit architectures like Alpha and UltraSparc, and incorporates the Haifa scheduler which can be a big performance boost.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
So if you want to use it under the GPLv3, you can do so.
If Linus really wanted to change the license from v2 to v3, he'd have to get the permission of the other copyright holders to the kernel.
RMS talks about the NeXT and ncftp issues in Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism.
SCO is being segfaulted already, in response to their earlier whining.
No news here; this is why SCO is aiming for binary compatibility with Linux for SCO UnixWare 7.
The problem with this strategy is that SCO is thus placing itself in a market that strongly prefers free software, without offering much additional value in their proprietary products.
Either SCO will wake up and smell the roses, or it will soon feed the roses.
" We still think of ourselves as rebels, but we're boring establishment now. " said the dinosaurs, just before the meteor struck.
This 3-day course will cover the practical aspects of installing LINUX and the configuration of network services. LINUX kernel compilation and 'public domain' software installation will also be included.
I'm willing to overlook the incorrect capitalisation of "Linux". But I strongly suspect they're using "public domain" wrongly.
To quote "Categories of Free and Non-Free Software" ( link):
Public domain software is software that is not copyrighted. It is a special case of non-copylefted free software, which means that some copies or modified versions may not be free at all.
Sometimes people use the term ``public domain'' in a loose fashion to mean ``free'' or ``available gratis.'' However, ``public domain'' is a legal term and means, precisely, ``not copyrighted''. For clarity, we recommend using ``public domain'' for that meaning only, and using other terms to convey the other meanings.
SoZ is actually optimistic when you compare it to his The Jagged Orbit (in which people are scared to death of having to leave their houses) and The Sheep Look Up (the Dutch cover blurb described it as "a country being destroyed by pollution; environmental, political, social, personal"), both of which are eerily similar to aspects of our society.
Other dystopias this thread reminds me of are A Clockwork Orange's meaningless violence, and Fahrenheit 451 (what happens to a society that acts on the censorship cries).
IMO, the biggest impact the internet has in terms of socialisation is that it strongly reduces the influcence your physical location (e.g. the country you grow up in) on your culture. It allows you to communicate with kindred spirits all over the globe.
But this isn't the global village where we're all in the same vanilla culture. It's a bazaar in which just about everyone can find the cultural niches they belong to (SF fandom, taoism, wicca, Linux, cartoons, bikers, classical philosophy etc. etc.)
This can be a great thing, but it can also be very bad, as a means of spreading memes like racism, self-destructive religious cultism etc.
The internet is a technology that is changing communication. It is not inherently good, nor inherently evil. It is not "the medium is the message". It is the medium in which all messages can be found.
It is our individual responsibility to learn and to teach how to use this technology for good.
Please note that Clueless Users Are Bad For Debian" was written by a Debian user, not a Debian developer.
Debian has always focussed on doing the right thing in technical manners. Many of its developers are long-time UN*X and Linux users, who go for flexibility and power, and are less likely to suffer from user unfriendliness. This doesn't make Debian inherently user-unfriendly. Debian is about open development. If you care about user friendliness in Debian, you're more than welcom to help out.
There's also a Reasons to Choose Debian document on the Debian website.
No. While the QPL (the license under which Qt 2 will be brought out), is a free license, it is not compatible with the GPL.
http://www.kde.org/kdeqtfoundation.html
This would only come into play if e.g. Troll Tech went bankrupt. Qt would then be released under the BSD license, which would resolve the issue.
Hopefully, this will be an incentive for KDE to work towards resolving the licensing issue so that the regular Debian distribution can offer KDE. Although there will soon be a DFSG-free Qt (under the QPL), the incompatibility between the GPL and Qt's license (see Debian's analysis) persists with a QPL-licensed Qt.
This should solve the "political issue" indeed. glibc2.1 isn't on ftp.gnu.org yet, but then again, there hasn't been an official announcement from the FSF blessing EGCS as the one true gcc yet.
What this meant in practice, was that EGCS advanced rapidly, and has succeeded in reintegrating most of the separate GCC development communities (C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Pentium optimisations) with major improvements (Haifa scheduler, integrated testsuite, much closer to C++ standard).
As one of the co-maintainers of the Debian EGCS packages, I'm extremely happy about this. I've found the EGCS developers quite responsive about bug reports, and often found bugs in release versions to be fixed in snapshots already.
I use these tools as a means of dealing with information overload. Take ACs for instance. Yes, perhaps that one anonymous coward in a hundred has something sensible to say, but the signal to noise ratio of AC comments makes it too expensive time-wise for me to look at it. Hopefully, a moderator will pick it up and put it in the plus-scores.
This is no different than the way we read a newspaper (by skipping most of it) and judge books by their covers or publisher blurbs. In an ideal world, we'd be immortal and have the time not to have to rely on such crude ways of sorting. But in the real world, time is limited, and this type of software can be used as a tool for using that limited time more efficiently.
This is good news. Let's hope Logitech will apply for Open Hardware certification for these controllers. Open Hardware is a good initiative that unfortunately hasn't received much attention so far.
The sold the NetWinder division to Hardware Canada Computing.
what distro does the netwinder run anyway?
IIRC, a modified Red Hat 4.2 port.
One of the things that made Corel look at Debian was the Debian-ARM port, by which they were impressed.
Debian is made by it's developers. The Debian project isn't a formal legal entity, but a self-organising group of volunteers under the Debian constitution.
SPI was orginally created as a legal entity to foster Debian development (e.g. for companies to have something to donate equipment and money to). SPI nowadays supports other free software development projects besides Debian.
What makes this great IMO is that Corel has the guts not to take the easy way and join up with a company, but has genuinely listened to its techies, and chosen to cooperate with a bazaar organisation.