Do you worry about the old GPL being enforcable? It's never been challenged in a court of law. It's never been tested to see if it stands up. RMS acknowledges that.
Dear AC,
No, I don't worry at all. If the GPL tends not to be valid, the people who have challenged it are then left with the default in copyright law, which is all rights reserved. Even if they win, they lose. Would a court say "yes, you can use and redistribut GPL code without any obligation to anyone else"? If they did, that interpretation would apply to code under other licenses as well - including that stuff in the boxes from Microsoft. Forget about that happening.
I don't like Matt's revision for one point - that it excuses things like dynamic linking as not being covered. Given today's COBRA and so on, any linking at all can be dynamic.
After you loose your patent, everyone will be able to use your method and build upon it.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but the reality is that after you lose your patent, it's useless to everyone else - at least where most software patents are concerned. The state of the art will have progressed too far, and there will thus be no real quid-pro-quo for the public.
There's a quote of Lincoln on one side of the patent office building in Washington DC. It says something about the patent system coupling innovation with interest, which I guess means providing a reward for innovation. That's where the money comes in.
But of course there are any number of situations where that reward is not the optimal means of promoting innovation, or isn't even appropriate - one example is the case of public-funded research resulting in private patents, another would be when the monopoly grants not merely methods but entire categories of business, as with today's broadly-interpreted business method patents.
If this comes to pass, forget about listening to the radio for frequencies from 100 KHz to 30 MHz. But I seriously doubt it will come to pass in the U.S., the radiated interference is too high.
Power lines simply aren't made for data, shoe-horning data into them isn't going to work very well. The solution for rural bandwidth is still wireless mesh networking.
I ordered one of these last week. I'm told it appears as a compact flash serial modem running PPP, doesn't really require a proprietary driver (although proprietary modem management software comes with it), and works as a general network device rather than just web and email.
My 1/2 Gigabyte SD card came in the mail today. I have an 802.11 card from SMC in the CF slot right now. I can ssh from my desktop to the palmtop.
I am about to put the OpenZaurus load on the machine instead of the partially-proprietary load it comes with.
The serial and USB ports are still free after you plug in that modem.
By the way, the wireless modem is a CF serial device running PPP, a very conventional Linux networking device accessable by free software, not some proprietary BS with a closed driver.
I haven't figured out how to make the USB slave into a master yet, but it's probably possible. I just got a 1/2 Gig SD card, and an SMC 802 card usually lives in the CF slot when I'm home.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be a troll or not but I'll treat it as a serious question.
No, this is not what Microsoft was talking about. Microsoft was upset because there is an implicit quid-pro-quo in the GPL - if yospu derive works from it, you do so under the same terms as the people who gave you their work to derive from. Microsoft feels that this is "anti-commercial" and would prefer to have the work of the free software community without any reciprocity. I don't see why anyone who writes and gives away their own code would want to give them that. And of course, the GPL terms are much nicer terms than Microsoft puts on a lot of its own code, which are essentially "derive from this or redistribute it in any way, and we'll sue you". So, I suggest that you take the Microsoft complaints as the FUD that they are.
Also, most Free Software developers are themselves capitalists, and they were not calling MS "capitalist scum". They were criticizing Microsoft for various forms of simple dishonesty which have been well documented elsewhere. Please do not confuse Free Software with communism - unless you want to confuse public roads and various other forms of public commons - an essential part of capitalism - as communism too.
Yes, I understand it's a joke. But Linus and I can no longer say anything in a public venue without the risk that it will be quoted out of context, and he has left himself wide open for our enemies to quote him that way this time. I learned this lesson in a painful manner - once I suggested on a Debian list that we sue Corel for license violations. My comment was the subject of a Slashdot story half an hour later. Same for Linus this time.
Actually, it's up to people like you, Bruce, to take the lead.
And I will. But it really grates that not only does Linus not help, once in a while he does something negative (like his rant about ideology a while back). I could use a lot of help, not only from you, but from people who get as much publicity as Linus. We're not winning the battle, you know.
I didn't like it either. How do you "whack" Microsoft? Fly a jet plane into their Redmond campus? I'd rather not be identified with the sort of person who does that.
Linus isn't interested in standing up for our right to code. He'd doesn't like politics, and would prefer to ignore the problem. But the problem won't go away. Rather than say immature stuff like that, it's time for him to use his notoriety to speak publicly about the problem and why it should be fixed.
Large runs are identical, along with function names and file names. Two programmers writing from the same specification would not converge that way. The probability of this is so extremely low, it's not worth discussing.
His criteria include a user-friendly interface. The Linux Router Project has a management front-end and is packaged like a product. Netfilter is the functionality without the rest of the package.
OK, sorry to jump upon you, but the confusion of a product and the product line sounded too much like market-speak for me.
If your criteria include a Windows implementation, we're not going to meet them very often - we are more interested in other platforms. But in the case of the router, that's certainly an advantage. I cringe at the thought of someone hosting their firewall on the Windows OS.
GnuPG is intended to replace the PGP encryption program, not the entire PGP product line. Of course, there are Free Software replacements for those other products as well:
Encrypted filesystem: GPL driver for Linux
Firewall: Linux Router Project and others.
IDS: Snort and its ilk.
IPSEC tunneling VPN: I think this is in Free S/WAN.
I don't think it would fragment the community any more than it does to have separate URLs for all of the various Free Software projects. If it became a big problem, Freshmeat could add an "IRC" field to their index.
Regarding where donations should go, sure, you get to decide for yourself. The point I am making is that there are limited funds, unfortunately, and that thus we need to prioritize. We can't always have a win-win in this - someone's going to be unfunded. And my advice is that there really are higher priorities.
Lilo (Rob Levin) contacted me some time ago looking for support for him to operate OPN full-time. My response was, and still is, that rather than have an organized IRC network operated by Rob, various projects should operate their own IRC servers, not very differently from the way that many projects operate mail and FTP servers.
I fear (and I could be wrong) that Lilo has mixed up his personal goals with his estimation of the importance of the project to the community.
If and when I have grant money to hand out, either my own or that of a corporate sponsor, it will go directly to Free Software authors for production of Free Software, and to efforts to preserve our right to code like EFF.
We were editing our posts at the same time. Yours is correct, and there's one more thing to consider. Isn't it in our interest to kill an MS cash cow? They are too darned powerful for comfort.
Look at all of the bad legal stuff going on in Washington and elsewhere. If we want to have the freedom to code the way we like, we are going to need lots of friends. Users, vendors with money, companies that use us instead of Windows, governments, and so on. OpenOffice is for them, not you. They won't ever be Emacs users, their brains don't work that way, and they don't want their brains to work that way. We don't have to do anything to make you happy any longer, you're already there. They need OpenOffice, and easy installation and management, which are less of a problem than the office suite.
OpenOffice is the most important application in Open Source. Its importance is no less than that of the Linux kernel, and it should have a community as large. Yet, in the entire existence of the OpenOffice project, about 100 people have signed a copyright assignment agreement with Sun, and most of them did it for porting work or documentation, not new feature development.
There are still structural problems that keep the project from working. It doesn't yet offer a fair quid-pro-quo for the developers, and this is underscored by Sun's recent actions on MacOS - they forked their own project without a word to their community. Sun promised to transfer the code base to an OpenOffice.org foundation and backed out. They have made no covenant to keep the project free as long as they develop it. So, why would someone on the outside want to invest the huge time (possibly close to a year) to ramp up on that project to the point that they can make a contribution? They'll spend that time on GNOME, KDE, or something equally complex where there's a more fair proposition for the outside developers.
I was at the OpenOffice BOF last night. There were about a dozen people. Many of them were not programmers. Imagine a Bof with Linus - how big would that have been? The OO BOF should be no smaller. This was embarassing.
Sun spent a lot of money on StarOffice, but they must realize that the value of this product isn't its revenue capture, it's an MS Office killer. They must now do what's necessary to make a real community work for OpenOffice. Yesterday's announcement is only a baby step in that direction.
It would be fine to let the market rule if there was a fair market - a level playing field upon which Free Software and proprietary could compete. But there's no such thing. The market is currently very strongly biased to proprietary software, and there are legal mechanisms, software patents and DRM being some of the most onerous ones, that keep the preference for proprietary software in place. If you want to have these products compete in a fair market, you'll have to repair the market first.
It's made to appear neutral... but it isn't. For example, their stance on patents in standards would rule out Open Source implementations of those standards. Also, current legislation very strongly favors proprietary software - there's just not much mention of Open Source in legislation at all, and whatever legislation there is that effects software is written assuming that the software is produced under a proprietary model. Asking for "no preferences" at this time is actually asking to maintain the status quo of a strong bias for proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear AC,
No, I don't worry at all. If the GPL tends not to be valid, the people who have challenged it are then left with the default in copyright law, which is all rights reserved. Even if they win, they lose. Would a court say "yes, you can use and redistribut GPL code without any obligation to anyone else"? If they did, that interpretation would apply to code under other licenses as well - including that stuff in the boxes from Microsoft. Forget about that happening.
Bruce
I don't like Matt's revision for one point - that it excuses things like dynamic linking as not being covered. Given today's COBRA and so on, any linking at all can be dynamic.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but the reality is that after you lose your patent, it's useless to everyone else - at least where most software patents are concerned. The state of the art will have progressed too far, and there will thus be no real quid-pro-quo for the public.
Bruce
But of course there are any number of situations where that reward is not the optimal means of promoting innovation, or isn't even appropriate - one example is the case of public-funded research resulting in private patents, another would be when the monopoly grants not merely methods but entire categories of business, as with today's broadly-interpreted business method patents.
Bruce
I'm not near the demo house. How's the shortwave listening in there?
Bruce
Power lines simply aren't made for data, shoe-horning data into them isn't going to work very well. The solution for rural bandwidth is still wireless mesh networking.
Bruce
My 1/2 Gigabyte SD card came in the mail today. I have an 802.11 card from SMC in the CF slot right now. I can ssh from my desktop to the palmtop.
I am about to put the OpenZaurus load on the machine instead of the partially-proprietary load it comes with.
Bruce
By the way, the wireless modem is a CF serial device running PPP, a very conventional Linux networking device accessable by free software, not some proprietary BS with a closed driver.
I haven't figured out how to make the USB slave into a master yet, but it's probably possible. I just got a 1/2 Gig SD card, and an SMC 802 card usually lives in the CF slot when I'm home.
Bruce
Typo: Read "yospu" as "you". Sorry.
No, this is not what Microsoft was talking about. Microsoft was upset because there is an implicit quid-pro-quo in the GPL - if yospu derive works from it, you do so under the same terms as the people who gave you their work to derive from. Microsoft feels that this is "anti-commercial" and would prefer to have the work of the free software community without any reciprocity. I don't see why anyone who writes and gives away their own code would want to give them that. And of course, the GPL terms are much nicer terms than Microsoft puts on a lot of its own code, which are essentially "derive from this or redistribute it in any way, and we'll sue you". So, I suggest that you take the Microsoft complaints as the FUD that they are.
Also, most Free Software developers are themselves capitalists, and they were not calling MS "capitalist scum". They were criticizing Microsoft for various forms of simple dishonesty which have been well documented elsewhere. Please do not confuse Free Software with communism - unless you want to confuse public roads and various other forms of public commons - an essential part of capitalism - as communism too.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
And I will. But it really grates that not only does Linus not help, once in a while he does something negative (like his rant about ideology a while back). I could use a lot of help, not only from you, but from people who get as much publicity as Linus. We're not winning the battle, you know.
Thanks
Bruce
Linus isn't interested in standing up for our right to code. He'd doesn't like politics, and would prefer to ignore the problem. But the problem won't go away. Rather than say immature stuff like that, it's time for him to use his notoriety to speak publicly about the problem and why it should be fixed.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
If your criteria include a Windows implementation, we're not going to meet them very often - we are more interested in other platforms. But in the case of the router, that's certainly an advantage. I cringe at the thought of someone hosting their firewall on the Windows OS.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Regarding where donations should go, sure, you get to decide for yourself. The point I am making is that there are limited funds, unfortunately, and that thus we need to prioritize. We can't always have a win-win in this - someone's going to be unfunded. And my advice is that there really are higher priorities.
Thanks
Bruce
I fear (and I could be wrong) that Lilo has mixed up his personal goals with his estimation of the importance of the project to the community.
If and when I have grant money to hand out, either my own or that of a corporate sponsor, it will go directly to Free Software authors for production of Free Software, and to efforts to preserve our right to code like EFF.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Look at all of the bad legal stuff going on in Washington and elsewhere. If we want to have the freedom to code the way we like, we are going to need lots of friends. Users, vendors with money, companies that use us instead of Windows, governments, and so on. OpenOffice is for them, not you. They won't ever be Emacs users, their brains don't work that way, and they don't want their brains to work that way. We don't have to do anything to make you happy any longer, you're already there. They need OpenOffice, and easy installation and management, which are less of a problem than the office suite.
Does that make sense?
Thanks
Bruce
There are still structural problems that keep the project from working. It doesn't yet offer a fair quid-pro-quo for the developers, and this is underscored by Sun's recent actions on MacOS - they forked their own project without a word to their community. Sun promised to transfer the code base to an OpenOffice.org foundation and backed out. They have made no covenant to keep the project free as long as they develop it. So, why would someone on the outside want to invest the huge time (possibly close to a year) to ramp up on that project to the point that they can make a contribution? They'll spend that time on GNOME, KDE, or something equally complex where there's a more fair proposition for the outside developers.
I was at the OpenOffice BOF last night. There were about a dozen people. Many of them were not programmers. Imagine a Bof with Linus - how big would that have been? The OO BOF should be no smaller. This was embarassing.
Sun spent a lot of money on StarOffice, but they must realize that the value of this product isn't its revenue capture, it's an MS Office killer. They must now do what's necessary to make a real community work for OpenOffice. Yesterday's announcement is only a baby step in that direction.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce