home also gives you a nice easy central location to backup. It's not just viruses that can destroy files, bad hardware can do it as well (i.e. failing disk), so you should be doing that anyway.
Yup, so free you can't fix bugs in code running on your own machine because it's a closed derivative that belongs to someone else. That's the freedom the GPL represents, the freedom of the user, rather than the original developers. It all depends on whose freedom you consider more important and why all the trolling about how the BSD license is 100% free unlike the GPL is pointless and dishonest.
It's also why the licenses can and do co-exist quite happily and why neither is likely to disappear in a hurry. No matter how much you might want that.
"Don't forget that by making the code BSD, it will become usable in MANY projects for which the GPL is not, therey becoming available to a much larger number of users.
So if you want your code to be as useful to as many people as possible, you might very well choose the BSD license."
A derivative with improvements you need could easily be released on a different platform than what you are using. If there's been sufficient forking from the original there's not a lot you can do in that case. Apart from campaign for a release for your potentially niche platform.
"I would say that this is a great *problem* of the GPL. It's very easy in an open project to get spread, diluted copyright ownership. With the GPL, relicensing to a commercial customer can become impossible."
That really depends on whether or not you just accept random patches, or if you're planning to license the code commercially, whether you require copyright assignment to you before applying those patches.
I'm a Linux user at home, and generally use free software for everything, but still buy the odd piece of commercial Linux software. In the free software world there is no need for piracy, it's an irrelevance. It is more closely aligned with the way people actually feel (i.e. should be able to share software).
Filesharing in the commercial world is an effective method to fight piracy. At least, the kind of piracy they claim they hate, i.e. the kind that funds "organised crime" and "terrorism". As the people who want to get stuff for free/cheaply, have a way of doing it without giving money to the piracy outfits. When they clamp down on file sharing they are actually encouraging the criminal style of piracy (bootleg dvd/software) and allowing them to increase the size of their market.
As far as I can see they have two real choices to fight that piracy: 1) lower prices so that pirate copies are no longer attractive (the free software world is an example of how well this works) 2) keep their high margin products for those who are happy to pay, then stop trying to kill filesharing while providing means to purchase online
They seem to be mostly following option 2), but keep trying to fight filesharing, which if successful will only make bootleg piracy a much bigger business.
"Easy to say. The only truly intuitive interface is the nipple."
That's little more than an urban myth. Try watching a new born baby and you'll see it's as much a learned interface as anything else. Some never get it. I'll leave the comments on who they grow up to be to someone else.
"Yes, and Gecko supports Mozilla-specific CSS extensions. So?"
In a way that obeys the standard, using a -moz prefix, while microsoft refuse to follow the standard and go ahead and pollute the CSS namespace with their extensions rather than using -ms.
"A place where they simply have lots of "analog" media on display? So it would seem that discounting the value of digital media and assuming it will lead to more "analog" media sales is not very forward thinking at all."
As an avid reader I couln't disagree more. And I know lots of other avid readers who feel the same way. Nothing beats having a genuine physical copy of a novel in your hands, no printed on a fast printed copy is going to replace that. Bookshops are also wonderful places, if you exclude the souless bestseller laiden fare you sometimes get at stations and airports.
> No, "they", "their", and so on are plural. If you > want to be gender-neutral, you should use "he" and > "his."
In English as opposed to American English it is perfect valid to use "they" and "their" to be gender neutral. Looks much less stupid than when using a specific gender to give an example in a user manual.
It's not the same at all. Linux is represented by a large number of competing distributions. Linux distro makers can ship whatever media players they want by default, often several competing ones and they're not designed to lock you in to RHMF (Red Hat Media Format). So a distro is perfectly able to not install XMMS by default.
Is an OEM free to sell a Windows computer with a competing media player instead of Windows Media Player?
"Sure this is an inconvenience, but (still) overrated. It's just not a major issue to reboot a machine. Word. Move on."
In the real world where you're trying to run a service any downtime is an issue. Especially where you have services which won't automatically start up after a reboot.
"What continues to be a major road block to widespread adoption of Linux by the masses is not just patching, but just installing applications at all. It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users."
I say rubbish to that. I'm been using both Linux and Windows for years, and Linux has Windows beat by miles. The vast majority of applications you need are packaged by the distribution, so you just search in the distros package manager. Most commercial apps come with graphical installers. You might find the odd application you need to install from source (a lot simpler than installing an app from source on windows), but those tend to be cutting edge version 0.1.0 versions of software that you'd wouldn't normally even see in the windows world.
On the other hand, recently I've had to search for an install some apps for windows at work to do basic stuff that normally comes on the distro CDs under Linux. It involved lots of searching of random websites, no real assurance as to where it came from. Different types of installers, or zip files you decompress to a random location on the c:\ drive. There's simply no comparison.
"There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things. And a smooth GUI installer...."
If you're sitting at a commandline, ignoring the package manager and just using rpm maybe, but this is something I've not really seen in a long time. Either with urpmi in Mandrake (GUI installer), or now synaptic (GUI installer) in Ubunutu. Every major distro does this for you now.
Opera didn't really have it first, they had buttons across the bottom like a task bar when you maximised windows. But it was more like a workaround for MDI, and didn't have the majority of the features that differentiate tabbed browsing. In reality all Opera had originally was a switcher between MDI windows.
The first usable tabs I came across were in Mozilla, though I think it was Skipstone, an earlier Mozilla derivative that did them first.
Don't forget that in 1984 everything is subject to doctoring, that includes the year. In fact in a society where information provision is key and resources are low, a ten year cycle might well be preferable, you can keep recycling earlier information then. So the year after 1989 is always 1980.
"Exactly why is tabbed browing better than just firing up another IE? Isn't doing Alt-tab to change windows just as easy as whatever it is you do to change firefox tabs?"
The real answer is to use them for a while, it soon becomes abundantly clear. Let's take a simple example, a news site with a list of stories.
With IE and Alt-Tab you cannot usably scroll down through the list of story summaries and open all the stories you're interested in without interrupting the flow of what you're doing. In Firefox you scroll down using the mouse wheel, and right click on the links to any stories you're interested in. They then open as tabs in the background and you browse the tabs when ready.
In IE this would be an iterative process of: 1. scroll 2. right click story link 3. choose open new window 4. alt tab back to original window 5. find where you were 6. return to 1 until all links chosen 7. alt tab to new window 8. read story, return to 7 until all read
Steps 3 to 5 are completely unnecessary with tabbed browsing. So with firefox that same workflow is:
1. scroll 2. middle click 3. return to 1 until all links chosen 4. select tab for next story (or close current to do the same thing) 5. read story, return to 4 until all read
Of course you can even open something in a new window and have groups tabs related to a particular site. And that's just one example. There are lots of ways it improves you effiency.
You can also set your homepage to be a number of tabs. Rather than visiting X bookmarks.
Unlike moral family orientated countries like Iran which are perfection personified.
Morals are relative, always have been and always will been. There are several examples of religious morality that I would consider amoral that get in the way of moral behaviour, e.g. stopping individuals marrying for love.
"Then I'd like to draw. In Windows I'd normally use Corel Painter (super-realistic real-life artist tool emulations), openCanvas and maybe even Photoshop. Okay, so I try to be open-minded about this and I try for the umpteenth time to use GIMP. It's no match to Painter, of course."
If you want to draw on Linux use Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), neither The GIMP or Photoshop are drawing applications.
"Unless you count urpmi and stuff" is a big understatement, as I doubt if there are many people who still use plain rpm these days. All the three big distros listed in the survey use a wrapper around rpm by default that do dependency resolution and automatic fetching, so that trims your list by a fair amount:
Binary based - source based (you can get source packages via urpmi but I've not used it enough to say if it's equivalent)
different versions of packages - USE flags
So the list of differences is actually smaller than you might think.
No it doesn't. It only affects code that is combined with the GPL code and released. You can use the code with your own code to your heart's content, but if you want to distribute GPL code then any code combined with it needs to be GPL (or GPL compatible) as well.
But of course you accepted the license when you used the code so that shouldn't cause you any problems. It's entirely voluntary. If you decide you want to release your code, but not GPL it, you can just replace the GPL code with more of your own.
So it doesn't affect any code unless the author of that code wants it to. How's that for freedom?
"You could be playing an RPG, and then towards the end it could force you to worship some false god to continue. Video games are notorious for suprises popping up."
But what's to stop a subversive "christian" game doing the same thing? Wouldn't that be an attractive method for the evil corrupters of good god-fearing Christians. Selling wholesome Christian games with a special surprise element.
Obviously, the only real solution is to write all the games that your children play yourself, and hope that you yourself having unknowingly been corrupted.
Except it didn't. Mozilla has had SVG support for ages, just not enabled by default. Though you could download versions with MathML and SVG support. And this is SVG Full, not Tiny.
Mozilla may use the MPL, but it's also tri-licensed with the GPL and LGPL. I doubt if there'd be have the stink there has been if the Sun code was dual licensed with the GPL. Which means you could use the code under either license.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I read this journal entry by one of my favourite artists a few days ago and couldn't agree with her more.
home also gives you a nice easy central location to backup. It's not just viruses that can destroy files, bad hardware can do it as well (i.e. failing disk), so you should be doing that anyway.
Yup, so free you can't fix bugs in code running on your own machine because it's a closed derivative that belongs to someone else. That's the freedom the GPL represents, the freedom of the user, rather than the original developers. It all depends on whose freedom you consider more important and why all the trolling about how the BSD license is 100% free unlike the GPL is pointless and dishonest.
It's also why the licenses can and do co-exist quite happily and why neither is likely to disappear in a hurry. No matter how much you might want that.
"Don't forget that by making the code BSD, it will become usable in MANY projects for which the GPL is not, therey becoming available to a much larger number of users.
So if you want your code to be as useful to as many people as possible, you might very well choose the BSD license."
A derivative with improvements you need could easily be released on a different platform than what you are using. If there's been sufficient forking from the original there's not a lot you can do in that case. Apart from campaign for a release for your potentially niche platform.
"I would say that this is a great *problem* of the GPL. It's very easy in an open project to get spread, diluted copyright ownership. With the GPL, relicensing to a commercial customer can become impossible."
That really depends on whether or not you just accept random patches, or if you're planning to license the code commercially, whether you require copyright assignment to you before applying those patches.
"In short, they get recognition and attribution, and the satisfaction that someone out there didn't reinvent the wheel all over again."
But if they then want to implement the new enhanced features added to the closed source version, then they do have to reinvent the wheel again.
I'm a Linux user at home, and generally use free software for everything, but still buy the odd piece of commercial Linux software. In the free software world there is no need for piracy, it's an irrelevance. It is more closely aligned with the way people actually feel (i.e. should be able to share software).
Filesharing in the commercial world is an effective method to fight piracy. At least, the kind of piracy they claim they hate, i.e. the kind that funds "organised crime" and "terrorism". As the people who want to get stuff for free/cheaply, have a way of doing it without giving money to the piracy outfits. When they clamp down on file sharing they are actually encouraging the criminal style of piracy (bootleg dvd/software) and allowing them to increase the size of their market.
As far as I can see they have two real choices to fight that piracy:
1) lower prices so that pirate copies are no longer attractive (the free software world is an example of how well this works)
2) keep their high margin products for those who are happy to pay, then stop trying to kill filesharing while providing means to purchase online
They seem to be mostly following option 2), but keep trying to fight filesharing, which if successful will only make bootleg piracy a much bigger business.
"how am I going to open a remote image with gimp ?
oh dear, no go"
File -> Open Location.
Seems to work fine to me, you can also drag the URL from another application.
"Easy to say. The only truly intuitive interface is the nipple."
That's little more than an urban myth. Try watching a new born baby and you'll see it's as much a learned interface as anything else. Some never get it. I'll leave the comments on who they grow up to be to someone else.
"Yes, and Gecko supports Mozilla-specific CSS extensions. So?"
In a way that obeys the standard, using a -moz prefix, while microsoft refuse to follow the standard and go ahead and pollute the CSS namespace with their extensions rather than using -ms.
"A place where they simply have lots of "analog" media on display? So it would seem that discounting the value of digital media and assuming it will lead to more "analog" media sales is not very forward thinking at all."
As an avid reader I couln't disagree more. And I know lots of other avid readers who feel the same way. Nothing beats having a genuine physical copy of a novel in your hands, no printed on a fast printed copy is going to replace that. Bookshops are also wonderful places, if you exclude the souless bestseller laiden fare you sometimes get at stations and airports.
> No, "they", "their", and so on are plural. If you
> want to be gender-neutral, you should use "he" and
> "his."
In English as opposed to American English it is perfect valid to use "they" and "their" to be gender neutral. Looks much less stupid than when using a specific gender to give an example in a user manual.
It's not the same at all. Linux is represented by a large number of competing distributions. Linux distro makers can ship whatever media players they want by default, often several competing ones and they're not designed to lock you in to RHMF (Red Hat Media Format). So a distro is perfectly able to not install XMMS by default.
Is an OEM free to sell a Windows computer with a competing media player instead of Windows Media Player?
"Sure this is an inconvenience, but (still) overrated. It's just not a major issue to reboot a machine. Word. Move on."
In the real world where you're trying to run a service any downtime is an issue. Especially where you have services which won't automatically start up after a reboot.
"What continues to be a major road block to widespread adoption of Linux by the masses is not just patching, but just installing applications at all. It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users."
I say rubbish to that. I'm been using both Linux and Windows for years, and Linux has Windows beat by miles. The vast majority of applications you need are packaged by the distribution, so you just search in the distros package manager. Most commercial apps come with graphical installers. You might find the odd application you need to install from source (a lot simpler than installing an app from source on windows), but those tend to be cutting edge version 0.1.0 versions of software that you'd wouldn't normally even see in the windows world.
On the other hand, recently I've had to search for an install some apps for windows at work to do basic stuff that normally comes on the distro CDs under Linux. It involved lots of searching of random websites, no real assurance as to where it came from. Different types of installers, or zip files you decompress to a random location on the c:\ drive. There's simply no comparison.
"There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things. And a smooth GUI installer...."
If you're sitting at a commandline, ignoring the package manager and just using rpm maybe, but this is something I've not really seen in a long time. Either with urpmi in Mandrake (GUI installer), or now synaptic (GUI installer) in Ubunutu. Every major distro does this for you now.
Yes, especially as there's no "-1 foaming at the mouth gibberish" moderation. You should be allowed to invent your own.
Opera didn't really have it first, they had buttons across the bottom like a task bar when you maximised windows. But it was more like a workaround for MDI, and didn't have the majority of the features that differentiate tabbed browsing. In reality all Opera had originally was a switcher between MDI windows.
The first usable tabs I came across were in Mozilla, though I think it was Skipstone, an earlier Mozilla derivative that did them first.
Don't forget that in 1984 everything is subject to doctoring, that includes the year. In fact in a society where information provision is key and resources are low, a ten year cycle might well be preferable, you can keep recycling earlier information then. So the year after 1989 is always 1980.
"Exactly why is tabbed browing better than just firing up another IE? Isn't doing Alt-tab to change windows just as easy as whatever it is you do to change firefox tabs?"
The real answer is to use them for a while, it soon becomes abundantly clear. Let's take a simple example, a news site with a list of stories.
With IE and Alt-Tab you cannot usably scroll down through the list of story summaries and open all the stories you're interested in without interrupting the flow of what you're doing. In Firefox you scroll down using the mouse wheel, and right click on the links to any stories you're interested in. They then open as tabs in the background and you browse the tabs when ready.
In IE this would be an iterative process of:
1. scroll
2. right click story link
3. choose open new window
4. alt tab back to original window
5. find where you were
6. return to 1 until all links chosen
7. alt tab to new window
8. read story, return to 7 until all read
Steps 3 to 5 are completely unnecessary with tabbed browsing. So with firefox that same workflow is:
1. scroll
2. middle click
3. return to 1 until all links chosen
4. select tab for next story (or close current to do the same thing)
5. read story, return to 4 until all read
Of course you can even open something in a new window and have groups tabs related to a particular site. And that's just one example. There are lots of ways it improves you effiency.
You can also set your homepage to be a number of tabs. Rather than visiting X bookmarks.
Unlike moral family orientated countries like Iran which are perfection personified.
Morals are relative, always have been and always will been. There are several examples of religious morality that I would consider amoral that get in the way of moral behaviour, e.g. stopping individuals marrying for love.
"Then I'd like to draw. In Windows I'd normally use Corel Painter (super-realistic real-life artist tool emulations), openCanvas and maybe even Photoshop. Okay, so I try to be open-minded about this and I try for the umpteenth time to use GIMP. It's no match to Painter, of course."
If you want to draw on Linux use Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), neither The GIMP or Photoshop are drawing applications.
"Unless you count urpmi and stuff" is a big understatement, as I doubt if there are many people who still use plain rpm these days. All the three big distros listed in the survey use a wrapper around rpm by default that do dependency resolution and automatic fetching, so that trims your list by a fair amount:
So the list of differences is actually smaller than you might think.
No it doesn't. It only affects code that is combined with the GPL code and released. You can use the code with your own code to your heart's content, but if you want to distribute GPL code then any code combined with it needs to be GPL (or GPL compatible) as well.
But of course you accepted the license when you used the code so that shouldn't cause you any problems. It's entirely voluntary. If you decide you want to release your code, but not GPL it, you can just replace the GPL code with more of your own.
So it doesn't affect any code unless the author of that code wants it to. How's that for freedom?
"You could be playing an RPG, and then towards the end it could force you to worship some false god to continue. Video games are notorious for suprises popping up."
But what's to stop a subversive "christian" game doing the same thing? Wouldn't that be an attractive method for the evil corrupters of good god-fearing Christians. Selling wholesome Christian games with a special surprise element.
Obviously, the only real solution is to write all the games that your children play yourself, and hope that you yourself having unknowingly been corrupted.
Except it didn't. Mozilla has had SVG support for ages, just not enabled by default. Though you could download versions with MathML and SVG support. And this is SVG Full, not Tiny.
Mozilla may use the MPL, but it's also tri-licensed with the GPL and LGPL. I doubt if there'd be have the stink there has been if the Sun code was dual licensed with the GPL. Which means you could use the code under either license.