On your first question: Yes, if company X holds the copyright, they can do whatever they like with their source. That includes releasing it twice under different licenses.
On your second question: No, unless the authors of the patch transferred the copyright to the original authors. Transvirtual has always been clear at stating that their commercial version was fully copyrighted by them.
Personally, I would not like to be in a position where I have to maintain two source trees, and must make sure my commercial tree is not infected by contributions of thirds to the GPL tree. How can I apply non-obvious bug fixes to the GPL tree, and at the same time independently fix the commercial one?
They are honest? So why do they sue you in 50 states on the same day when you just put up a webpage telling about their practices?
And they DO actively seek you out. They grab peopl e from the streets and make them do tests that invariably show that expensive courses are required. Once you have entered such a course it's not easy to get out.
If a company needs to charge $40 per copy if 5 out of 5 buy it, this means it needs $200 for every 5. Now only 3 out of 5 actually buy it, giving a corrected price of $66.67. Not as bad as the $100:)
But of course it doesn't work this way. The 3/5 legal vs 2/5 pirated only holds for one specific price tag. If the price gets higher, the piracy rate will too. Microsoft (for example) will ask that price which maximizes the total revenue. The whole pricing scheme really has little to do with the actual development costs.
Re:Redundant???? -MODERATORS: VIEW OLDEST FIRST
on
The Two LinuxHQs?
·
· Score: 1
5 points for 3 days is too much for most people...they're just trigger happy
sure, it's redundant to have two posts with about the same contents. but does anyone really care? it's pretty obvious neither of these two posters was aware of the other's post.
Moderating this response because it was offtopic is stupid. Granted, the original post about the typos can be considered to be off-topic. But having the top article moderated out, will moderate out the rest of the tree, so it's simply a waste of moderation points to go any further. Also, in this case the response was a valid one, given the subject of the first one.
Suppose someone makes an off-topic remark that initiates a very intesting discussion (about that off-topic topic). Should that all get moderated down? Can only Rob and Hemos set the subject??
People are just moderating for the sake of it. You get 5 points and only a few days to spend them. If you don't ues them you'll lose them. So people moderate like crazy.
Gecko is just a bunch of shared libraries. If you already have mozilla or netscape-5.0 running, using Gecko as a help browser for a solitaire game wouldn't cost you any extra memory nor diskspace. In fact, having all those little solitaire-like games include their own simple help viewer would really give unnecessary bloat.
The internal Gecko code is NPL, not GPL, and I'm not sure how that relates to LGPL. But it's apparently fine to use it as Active X component in IE, so I don't think the problem (with embedding Gecko in a GPL app) lies with Gecko... it's just that the GPL (as it stands) doesn't allow it. Of course the copyright holder could make a special exception, but only he can do that.
I don't know too much about licenses... But an ActiveX control might be considered to be an independent program, so that no GPL restrictions apply. Just like I can use Unix pipes to make the output of a GPL'd program the input of another program with incompatible license. (On the other hand, I guess the GPL might apply if the resulting application can't run without the ActiveX Mozilla control. And that could be solved by implementing a rather trivial ActiveX plain text viewer and distributing it with the application.)
Hmmm.. I should add I don't know anything about ActiveX:). And I think it's time to reread the GPL.
It is a GTK widget, so you need to have GTK. GTK is a widget set designed for Unix/X. So at least for the moment this particular thingy is tied to Unix (and only those Unices that have a working Mozilla port). Some people are porting GTK to Windows, so at some point it might be possible to use this widget in a win32 program. However, Mozilla has an implementation as Active X control (if that's the right way to phrase it), so embedding Mozilla in Windows applications should already be possible.
And no, this is not specific to any window manager.
Apparently this widget is distributed under the NPL. That's ok with me, but it does make me curious. For example, could I use this widget to embed Mozilla in a GPL'd program?
My name/e-mail is on a webpage listing Dutch Linux users. A few weeks ago that brought me two pieces of spam. One about some expensive Linux seminar that I'm not interested in. The other was kind of funny. It stated that people using Linux are usually rather smart and the right kind of people for their company. Checking the company's webpages revealed they only do NT...
How exactly is this moderation thing regulated? A week ago or so I Slashdot told me I had 5 moderation points. In two days time I used exactly one of them (to increase a score of some article to +2), and the third day the whole moderation thing was gone. Does anyone know what happened? Is this normal?
If they only release it as GPL, it can't go into the BSD kernel. But nothing stops them from releasing it under multiple licences. But I highly doubt they'll go with anything BSD-like. That would be like telling Sun 'here's our XFS file system, please adopt and expand it for your own proprietary use'.
Slashdot Mirror
On your first question: Yes, if company X holds the copyright, they can do whatever they like with their source. That includes releasing it twice under different licenses.
On your second question: No, unless the authors of the patch transferred the copyright to the original authors. Transvirtual has always been clear at stating that their commercial version was fully copyrighted by them.
Personally, I would not like to be in a position where I have to maintain two source trees, and must make sure my commercial tree is not infected by contributions of thirds to the GPL tree. How can I apply non-obvious bug fixes to the GPL tree, and at the same time independently fix the commercial one?
They are honest? So why do they sue you in 50 states on the same day when you just put up a webpage telling about their practices?
And they DO actively seek you out. They grab peopl e from the streets and make them do tests that invariably show that expensive courses are required. Once you have entered such a course it's not easy to get out.
Damn... is Bob Young really one of those?
Idle machines use less energy. When idle, the
processor executes the halt instruction which
saves power. This does not hold for Windows 95.
Intelligent life on planet Linux :)
I like your {M]eta tag!
Hmmmm 2/5 is pirated, and 3/5 is not.
:)
If a company needs to charge $40 per copy if 5 out of 5 buy it, this means it needs $200 for every 5. Now only 3 out of 5 actually buy it, giving a corrected price of $66.67. Not as bad as the $100
But of course it doesn't work this way. The 3/5 legal vs 2/5 pirated only holds for one specific price tag. If the price gets higher, the piracy rate will too. Microsoft (for example) will ask that price which maximizes the total revenue. The whole pricing scheme really has little to do with the actual development costs.
You should consider trying Linux. Sure, it's hard to pirate, but it could potentially save your future employer a hell of a lot money.
And have you ever considered spending your time on a little programming? Lots of people could benefit and you would actually learn something useful.
What happened is that somebody read Slashdot....
5 points for 3 days is too much for most people...they're just trigger happy
sure, it's redundant to have two posts with about the same contents. but does anyone really care? it's pretty obvious neither of these two posters was aware of the other's post.
Moderating this response because it was offtopic is stupid. Granted, the original post about the typos can be considered to be off-topic. But having the top article moderated out, will moderate out the rest of the tree, so it's simply a waste of moderation points to go any further. Also, in this case the response was a valid one, given the subject of the first one.
Suppose someone makes an off-topic remark that initiates a very intesting discussion (about that off-topic topic). Should that all get moderated down? Can only Rob and Hemos set the subject??
People are just moderating for the sake of it. You get 5 points and only a few days to spend them. If you don't ues them you'll lose them. So people moderate like crazy.
Or at least JBuilder3 is. Look here.
A few weeks ago, Borland announced that JBuilder3 will be ported to Linux... but it won't come out until early next year.
Gecko is just a bunch of shared libraries. If you already have mozilla or netscape-5.0 running, using Gecko as a help browser for a solitaire game wouldn't cost you any extra memory nor diskspace. In fact, having all those little solitaire-like games include their own simple help viewer would really give unnecessary bloat.
Sounds very reasonable. And gecko can be almost trivially replaced by a simple text viewer, so that doesn't sound like a problem.
Of course 'packaged together' can mean a lot of things.. not in one rpm, or not on one CD...
The internal Gecko code is NPL, not GPL, and I'm not sure how that relates to LGPL. But it's apparently fine to use it as Active X component in IE, so I don't think the problem (with embedding Gecko in a GPL app) lies with Gecko... it's just that the GPL (as it stands) doesn't allow it. Of course the copyright holder could make a special exception, but only he can do that.
Could anyone tell me how this message is offtopic? (It is currently moderated down.)
I don't know too much about licenses...
:). And I think it's time to reread the GPL.
But an ActiveX control might be considered to be an independent program, so that no GPL restrictions apply. Just like I can use Unix pipes to make the output of a GPL'd program the input of another program with incompatible license. (On the other hand, I guess the GPL might apply if the resulting application can't run without the ActiveX Mozilla control. And that could be solved by implementing a rather trivial ActiveX plain text viewer and distributing it with the application.)
Hmmm.. I should add I don't know anything about ActiveX
It is a GTK widget, so you need to have GTK. GTK is a widget set designed for Unix/X. So at least for the moment this particular thingy is tied to Unix (and only those Unices that have a working Mozilla port). Some people are porting GTK to Windows, so at some point it might be possible to use this widget in a win32 program. However, Mozilla has an implementation as Active X control (if that's the right way to phrase it), so embedding Mozilla in Windows applications should already be possible.
And no, this is not specific to any window manager.
Apparently this widget is distributed under the NPL. That's ok with me, but it does make me curious. For example, could I use this widget to embed Mozilla in a GPL'd program?
My name/e-mail is on a webpage listing Dutch Linux users. A few weeks ago that brought me two pieces of spam. One about some expensive Linux seminar that I'm not interested in. The other was kind of funny. It stated that people using Linux are usually rather smart and the right kind of people for their company. Checking the company's webpages revealed they only do NT...
How exactly is this moderation thing regulated? A week ago or so I Slashdot told me I had 5 moderation points. In two days time I used exactly one of them (to increase a score of some article to +2), and the third day the whole moderation thing was gone. Does anyone know what happened? Is this normal?
If they only release it as GPL, it can't go into the BSD kernel. But nothing stops them from releasing it under multiple licences. But I highly doubt they'll go with anything BSD-like. That would be like telling Sun 'here's our XFS file system, please adopt and expand it for your own proprietary use'.
Would have taken another day :)
And did you hear the latest news about year numbers? It seems we're gonna switch to 4 digit year numbers real soon now. Can you imagine the chaos!
:)
I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's exactly 3am on the next day here, and that stupid page is still up. I find that attitude insulting.