LLVM is already under multiple licenses, not just BSD. One non-BSD backend, and the most important current frontend is GPLed. So, I suspect the result is going to be under multiple licenses, and not nearly as useful as Open Source as it will be as proprietary software. Having this project produce a great proprietary compiler and a less useful Open Source one isn't success for the Open Source project.
GCC is about 20 years old now, isn't it? If it gets replaced, age is going to be the main reason. The second reason will probably be that its developers have not been the easiest people to work with. But currently, LLVM depends on the GCC front-end for most of its languages. Clang having good C++ support is like 2 years away by its developers own estimate, isn't it? Cross your fingers and hope that sugar daddies keep paying people to do that stuff under BSD.
Rrrrrrright. Which explains why, say, Windows is chock-full of shared libraries which any developer is allowed - nay, encouraged - to leverage without obligation.
"Without obligation" pretty much isn't going to happen unless the item under discussion is public domain. Probably the most important obligation you are under as a developer is the Visual Studio EULA, here. Section 3 especially has a tremendous pile of obligation related to building stuff with its DLLs.
You've got to read those licenses! You are probably under more obligations than you think, and more than any Free Software license would give you.
Most academic research these days, unfortunately, is proprietary from day one. That's how academic and corporate partnerships work today.
What if the developers actually do want to be paid for maintaining the software? Putting BSD terms means that nobody needs a commercial license, so you can't sell dual licensing, and that makes it harder for the developer to get paid. So what you get is some third party that didn't do the development work but gets the payment.
Microsoft would like to make it harder for trolls to target Microsoft, but their patent lobbying hasn't been asking for legislation that would make it harder for Microsoft to gain software patents. Indeed, they've asked for increases in software patenting in Europe repeatedly over the past several years.
The gasoline companies run a "will you join us" campaign about the environment, which is meant to make you feel good about them when they are actually a big part of the problem. Microsoft's lobbying efforts are every bit as cynical.
Microsoft could make Windows a really good platform for running GPL software. But they could not keep how they did it secret by putting it in a proprietary add-on to the GPL software.They could not make the GPL software use incompatible formats that only they had rights to use. They can do that with Apache software.
However, if Microsoft agrees to not enforce any patents against GPL, then any patent bomb added to the GPL could could then be used against Microsoft for their non-GPL software, and Microsoft would not be able to counter-sue because they've already agreed never to enfore their patents, thus they've lost the #1 advantage of a patent portfolio (using it to force a cross licensing deal).
I am having trouble making sense of how this patent bomb works. IBM puts some patented code in GPL software and waits for MS to use it in NON-GPL software?
The thing about Stallman is that way back in the early 1980's, he saw that computers would become an important part of our lives, and would be used to restrict people's activities with stuff like DRM. And lots of folks thought he was crazy. And 20 years later, the stuff he said would happen, did.
Now, if you don't think this is important, consider how you decide who to vote for. Where do you get the news? I bet most of it is through electronic devices. So, the folks who control what those devices do essentially control the way you vote.
If you haven't been thinking about this stuff deeply and for a long time, the folks who do will seem as if they live in a different world from the one you find yourself in. But they actually live in your world, it's just that you will take 20 years to get to the part they're seeing now.
OK, I went and looked at SMF. SMF's license does not permit distribution at all! You have to write for a separate permission if you want to distribute.
The Joomla developers, who own the copyright to their own software, acting together have the power to permit their software to be linked with SMF. They could issue a special SMF license in parallel with the GPL if they wanted to. But I certainly can't blame them for not wanting to.
SFLC probably told them that they could prohbit it, and that letting it go by without challenge would weaken their ability to enforce the GPL against other folks than SMF. SFLC probably did not advise them much about making a separate, non-GPL license for SMF. SFLC works for free to support Free Software projects by non-profit organizations only. If you want to support proprietary projects, you have to find another lawyer to help you with that.
Don't you think that's a little over the top? If I'm "batshit", it's only because I've written a polite response to someone who calls me "batshit":-)
First, Don't confuse me with Richard Stallman. I advise proprietary software companies as well as Open Source ones, and some of them I've advised not to make their product Open Source because they've had no understandable plan to keep making money afterward.
The Open Source movement (not OSS, please) is about making software better, but that is both application software and operating system software. When I see an application play that is meant to hurt our operating system, I have the responsibility to point out what's happening and to tell folks it might not be a good idea to help.
Yes, I agree that Firefox turned more people on to Open Source. But Firefox is desktop software. Server folks already understand Open Source.
I didn't read that comment back then, but the writer clearly has not read the GPL, because he's asking questions that are clearly answered by the license, and some of the things that he thinks the GPL prohbits are not in fact prohibited. Sometimes I really wish people would sit down with the license and learn it, and I think they'd not have such problems with it if they did.
I think you are confusing Linux, which is a kernel under the GPL, and the distribution usability issue, which relates to programs that are not necessarily under the GPL. Kernels don't have much to do with usability problems. That's the desktop UI software. GNOME is LGPL rather than GPL for its libraries. Qt is GPL for its libraries because they use dual-licensing for revenue.
Distributions do not run the two desktop projects, they do collaborate on them.
what stops IBM from planting patent bombs in Open Source software to use against Microsoft, since there is no "open source entity" to promise that no open source patents will ever be used against corporations, it's a catch-22.
Well, the GPL is really useful in this case, because it does separate IBM's proprietary software from Free Software, so that they can't use the patent grant to further their proprietary work, and the GPL's terms disallow the sort of "patent bomb" you're theorizing - a patent that IBM embeds in GPL code is usable for any purpose in any GPL code.
A patent grant to all GPL software for any purpose wouldn't hurt Microsoft's ability to defend themselves from proprietary software manufacturers.
Unfortunately, the very fact that Apache and BSD licensing allows proprietary software to be linked makes a patent grant for use with that sort of licensing much less desirable to the grantor.
Netcraft has two charts, "active servers" and "hostnames". The "active servers" one counts market share.
Actually, the server ID reporting said something like "Apache: Hello Netcraft!". I wanted to make a point with them about the fact that they were at least partially responsible for their own statistics being gamed by Microsoft. When they finally started scoring Lighttpd instead of calling it "other", I changed the ID to lighttpd.
Microsoft did not get me fired from anywhere. They did try, though. Jim Alchin once visited Carly Fiorina with a print out of my personal web site. Carly didn't really get it.
What happened at HP was partially the stupid merger, which put Compaq folks instead of HP in charge for Linux for 6 months before they got fired, and partially that HP didn't want to stand behind my anti-DMCA activities.
My past boss there is either running Tandem Nonstop or he's the captain of the Itanic.
It was very sad watching that company drive itself into the ground. I knew the merger was stupid, I told my boss the merger was stupid, and I could not do a thing about it. But I was really glad not to be there the day their ex-general-counsel took the 5th before Congress.
As a strategic consultant, unfortunately, I see other companies driving themselves into the ground even more often.
RE: Spring... is anybody still taking the "many eyes == security" claim seriously?
Yeah, actually. It works if you have a real community. Go read about what happened with the Firebird DB. It worked for Debian's SSL snafu, although it took longer than I'd like. It didn't work for Spring, because it was a single-company-dominated project.
Here is Microsoft's own explanation of how their DRM allows content to turn off capabilities of your computer.
What I hear about - and only hear about because I haven't had to touch a Vista machine - is that people have their video resolution handicapped, and that the latest service pack messes up boot authorization if you have dual boot. Somebody who actually has to touch Vista could tell you much more.
There is nothing in the GPL which requires me to give my changes to random people who i have not given the binaries to.
Actually you are wrong about that. GPL 2 section 3(b) says "any third party". So, yes, there is something in the GPL that says you do have to give code to random people.
You don't have to follow 3(b) if you follow 3(a). But you are not allowed to prevent any of the people you give source code under 3(a) from giving it to anyone they like.
Why is it that free software advocates can't stop whining when someone plays by their own rules?
Well, some of us have been saying for about 15 years that BSD-style licensing can be cruelly used by folks who want to be cruel, and that unfortunately the world has enough cruel folks that we're going to be hurt. So, don't tell me that it's my rules that are the problem.
And I am no fan of how IBM handled Apache either, and we also have IBM to blame for the software patent situation.
Uh-huh. And we hired the other guy who built IBM's patent kingdom to run Open Invention Network. He just retired from that. I still have a lot of trouble figuring out if OIN is there to protect Linux from Software Patents, or Software Patents from Linux.
GPL3 handles this particular issue differently, it wants a standard interface instead of a system one. The system exception is there because the original GNU stuff was developed on Sun's proprietary Unix, and RMS had to make it possible to legally run on that platform. Once GNU had its own platform, it wasn't necessary to make that exception any longer.
Given a standard interface, we can code it. It's the secret ones that are a problem.
Apache still has about a 15% lead in the market, with about half of total servers. Microsoft went out and persuaded operators of large domain parking systems to switch to IIS so that they could have a larger share on the Netcraft report. A while back GoDaddy wrote a press release about their deal to park with IIS, no kidding. Just like Microsoft to make that sort of deal and not even bother to tell the folks they paid to keep quiet about it.
You are right about Mosaic, it was a non-commercial-use license with an extra agreement required to get the source. I guess I was confusing it with something that Tim Berners-Lee told me about his work.
Microsoft stuff isn't just a scare story. The Office Open XML debacle is only a few months ago, and as far as I can tell they committed an actionable fraud in connection with it. I have independent comfirmation for what is at that link.
It's sort of like a totalitarian scare right after Tianammen Square, where we had real reason to be scared. By the way, China's problem is totalitarianism, not communism. I've met a head of state who calls what Microsoft does "corporate totalitarianism", and I think he's on target there.
I told the reporter from Redmond Journal yesterday that Microsoft was like someone who pisses on your front door and then knocks and asks nicely to come in to your party.
The BSD style licensed projects get more momentum and make forward progress.
I am having a little trouble figuring out if you are sarcastic or serious.
I have great respect for the BSD kernel projects, they do some things a lot better than Linux. But if you compare the pace of kernel development, by source-code line count, Linux tremendously outpaces BSD kernel development.
What you're left with after that is a lot of Java projects. Which are great for enterprise, right now. But building a stack of new Java code is definitely building today's code for today, not tomorrow's code. Java is the conservative choice of enterprise at the moment.
And then there are community issues, like the Spring bug that showed us that this enterprise-critical code wasn't getting the eyes that an Open Source project with more non-company programmers does.
Slashdot Mirror
GCC is about 20 years old now, isn't it? If it gets replaced, age is going to be the main reason. The second reason will probably be that its developers have not been the easiest people to work with. But currently, LLVM depends on the GCC front-end for most of its languages. Clang having good C++ support is like 2 years away by its developers own estimate, isn't it? Cross your fingers and hope that sugar daddies keep paying people to do that stuff under BSD.
"Without obligation" pretty much isn't going to happen unless the item under discussion is public domain. Probably the most important obligation you are under as a developer is the Visual Studio EULA, here. Section 3 especially has a tremendous pile of obligation related to building stuff with its DLLs.
You've got to read those licenses! You are probably under more obligations than you think, and more than any Free Software license would give you.
What if the developers actually do want to be paid for maintaining the software? Putting BSD terms means that nobody needs a commercial license, so you can't sell dual licensing, and that makes it harder for the developer to get paid. So what you get is some third party that didn't do the development work but gets the payment.
The gasoline companies run a "will you join us" campaign about the environment, which is meant to make you feel good about them when they are actually a big part of the problem. Microsoft's lobbying efforts are every bit as cynical.
Microsoft could make Windows a really good platform for running GPL software. But they could not keep how they did it secret by putting it in a proprietary add-on to the GPL software.They could not make the GPL software use incompatible formats that only they had rights to use. They can do that with Apache software.
I am having trouble making sense of how this patent bomb works. IBM puts some patented code in GPL software and waits for MS to use it in NON-GPL software?
Now, if you don't think this is important, consider how you decide who to vote for. Where do you get the news? I bet most of it is through electronic devices. So, the folks who control what those devices do essentially control the way you vote.
If you haven't been thinking about this stuff deeply and for a long time, the folks who do will seem as if they live in a different world from the one you find yourself in. But they actually live in your world, it's just that you will take 20 years to get to the part they're seeing now.
The Joomla developers, who own the copyright to their own software, acting together have the power to permit their software to be linked with SMF. They could issue a special SMF license in parallel with the GPL if they wanted to. But I certainly can't blame them for not wanting to.
SFLC probably told them that they could prohbit it, and that letting it go by without challenge would weaken their ability to enforce the GPL against other folks than SMF. SFLC probably did not advise them much about making a separate, non-GPL license for SMF. SFLC works for free to support Free Software projects by non-profit organizations only. If you want to support proprietary projects, you have to find another lawyer to help you with that.
First, Don't confuse me with Richard Stallman. I advise proprietary software companies as well as Open Source ones, and some of them I've advised not to make their product Open Source because they've had no understandable plan to keep making money afterward.
The Open Source movement (not OSS, please) is about making software better, but that is both application software and operating system software. When I see an application play that is meant to hurt our operating system, I have the responsibility to point out what's happening and to tell folks it might not be a good idea to help.
Yes, I agree that Firefox turned more people on to Open Source. But Firefox is desktop software. Server folks already understand Open Source.
Bruce
I didn't read that comment back then, but the writer clearly has not read the GPL, because he's asking questions that are clearly answered by the license, and some of the things that he thinks the GPL prohbits are not in fact prohibited. Sometimes I really wish people would sit down with the license and learn it, and I think they'd not have such problems with it if they did.
Some have always pointed to Eclipse as an anti-Sun strategy. That's why, they say, it's called "Eclipse".
Not sure that applies any longer. But IBM and MS could have common goals in working against Sun.
Distributions do not run the two desktop projects, they do collaborate on them.
Well, the GPL is really useful in this case, because it does separate IBM's proprietary software from Free Software, so that they can't use the patent grant to further their proprietary work, and the GPL's terms disallow the sort of "patent bomb" you're theorizing - a patent that IBM embeds in GPL code is usable for any purpose in any GPL code.
A patent grant to all GPL software for any purpose wouldn't hurt Microsoft's ability to defend themselves from proprietary software manufacturers.
Unfortunately, the very fact that Apache and BSD licensing allows proprietary software to be linked makes a patent grant for use with that sort of licensing much less desirable to the grantor.
Don't tell me I haven't thought this through.
Actually, the server ID reporting said something like "Apache: Hello Netcraft!". I wanted to make a point with them about the fact that they were at least partially responsible for their own statistics being gamed by Microsoft. When they finally started scoring Lighttpd instead of calling it "other", I changed the ID to lighttpd.
What happened at HP was partially the stupid merger, which put Compaq folks instead of HP in charge for Linux for 6 months before they got fired, and partially that HP didn't want to stand behind my anti-DMCA activities.
My past boss there is either running Tandem Nonstop or he's the captain of the Itanic.
It was very sad watching that company drive itself into the ground. I knew the merger was stupid, I told my boss the merger was stupid, and I could not do a thing about it. But I was really glad not to be there the day their ex-general-counsel took the 5th before Congress.
As a strategic consultant, unfortunately, I see other companies driving themselves into the ground even more often.
Yeah, actually. It works if you have a real community. Go read about what happened with the Firebird DB. It worked for Debian's SSL snafu, although it took longer than I'd like. It didn't work for Spring, because it was a single-company-dominated project.
What I hear about - and only hear about because I haven't had to touch a Vista machine - is that people have their video resolution handicapped, and that the latest service pack messes up boot authorization if you have dual boot. Somebody who actually has to touch Vista could tell you much more.
Actually you are wrong about that. GPL 2 section 3(b) says "any third party". So, yes, there is something in the GPL that says you do have to give code to random people.
You don't have to follow 3(b) if you follow 3(a). But you are not allowed to prevent any of the people you give source code under 3(a) from giving it to anyone they like.
Well, some of us have been saying for about 15 years that BSD-style licensing can be cruelly used by folks who want to be cruel, and that unfortunately the world has enough cruel folks that we're going to be hurt. So, don't tell me that it's my rules that are the problem.
And I am no fan of how IBM handled Apache either, and we also have IBM to blame for the software patent situation.
Uh-huh. And we hired the other guy who built IBM's patent kingdom to run Open Invention Network. He just retired from that. I still have a lot of trouble figuring out if OIN is there to protect Linux from Software Patents, or Software Patents from Linux.
Given a standard interface, we can code it. It's the secret ones that are a problem.
Apache still has about a 15% lead in the market, with about half of total servers. Microsoft went out and persuaded operators of large domain parking systems to switch to IIS so that they could have a larger share on the Netcraft report. A while back GoDaddy wrote a press release about their deal to park with IIS, no kidding. Just like Microsoft to make that sort of deal and not even bother to tell the folks they paid to keep quiet about it.
Microsoft stuff isn't just a scare story. The Office Open XML debacle is only a few months ago, and as far as I can tell they committed an actionable fraud in connection with it. I have independent comfirmation for what is at that link.
It's sort of like a totalitarian scare right after Tianammen Square, where we had real reason to be scared. By the way, China's problem is totalitarianism, not communism. I've met a head of state who calls what Microsoft does "corporate totalitarianism", and I think he's on target there.
I don't think he's going to print that :-)
I am having a little trouble figuring out if you are sarcastic or serious.
I have great respect for the BSD kernel projects, they do some things a lot better than Linux. But if you compare the pace of kernel development, by source-code line count, Linux tremendously outpaces BSD kernel development.
What you're left with after that is a lot of Java projects. Which are great for enterprise, right now. But building a stack of new Java code is definitely building today's code for today, not tomorrow's code. Java is the conservative choice of enterprise at the moment.
And then there are community issues, like the Spring bug that showed us that this enterprise-critical code wasn't getting the eyes that an Open Source project with more non-company programmers does.