Actually, I did talk with next-door-neighbors on both sides today. One of them asked a computer question during the conversation, but both were mostly social.
For autistics, we sure do spend a lot of time on IRC, Slashdot, with publications, and in general just talking to each other. The fact that we do not do it face-to-face has to do with our geographicaly distributed nature. We'd be talking to our next-door neighbors if they had the slightest concept of what we do.
We are both alienating and alienated, but not autistic.
The ITU, International Telecommunications Union, coordinates communications issues between nations, including frequency allocation. To date, they have not coordinated systems with range that is local to a nation, although the advent of mobile wireless data systems will make this necessary to some extent. So, wireless devices currently use different frequencies in different nations.
I can't believe that Apple didn't know this, that can't be true. I used to be in touch with their spectrum-management person, though he might have left there by now. Certainly they are cognizant of the basics of radio regulation.
Besides AirPort, you can't operate CB, Family Radio service (the little 1/2 watt walkie-talkies that have recently become popular) and Transient Radio Service (the color dot system walkie-talkies) in other countries, in general. Some countries don't want you to operate your Inmarsat or other satellite telephone, though this is more rare. In some countries you might be able to license them, but you don't just cross a border and get on the radio without checking first, lest you get a rude visit from the military including equipment confiscation or even inprisonment as a spy in some places - no kidding. Hams have worked out an international license, but they must comply with each country's frequency and power limitations while they are there.
I need a replicator for the Zope database. I think Digital Creations is working on a closed-source one for their support-option customers, but of course a Free Software one would be nice to have for the rest of us. Essentially, I'd like to put Zope servers in colocation sites that are distant from each other, and have all of them to have a local copy of a common Zope database, propogating updates to the database to each other, and resynchronizing with each other after a network partition event.
I'd also be interested in hearing about any Free Software databases that can do this sort of synchronization. Thanks
Well, this was the point behind Software in the Public Interest, Debian's corporation, but it turned out to not work in practice. The developers don't really want to function as employees of the corporation. So, the corporation owns some copyrights, collects money and spends it, but it doesn't own more than 1% of Debian software, and thus negociating on the behalf of the corporation doesn't work. Instead, I represented myself as an individual copyright holder.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:Actually, you're not correct about the GPL here
on
Corel Clears the Air
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· Score: 3
No, the GPL covers that one. They have to offer it to you on the same sort of medium upon which you got the binary.
Bruce
Re:Actually, you're not correct about the GPL here
on
Corel Clears the Air
·
· Score: 3
OK, you got me there. If someone has the binary and you did not distribute the source code to everyone to whom you distributed, you have to give them the corresponding source code.
However, just to be contentious, if you are not the person who gave them the binary, you don't necessarily have the complete source code. It could have been modified downstream. Nyah!:-)
We kept a really bad precedent from happening. You know the story about just letting the camel's nose into the tent, and then shortly afterward the entire camel is in the tent. Some day, some company is going to deliberately run rough-shod over our copyright rights, and we'll really have to defend ourselves. We could not allow the precedent that just a little violation was OK, for a little while. I don't believe the argument that there would have been no violation, either. The way I read the beta agreement, the GPL, and the definition of distributuion, there would have been a violation.
I am also very little concerned about scaring business away from Linux at this point. Business is all over us. Corel claims to be the world's second largest company in its market, just behind Microsoft. They can smell money as well as the next business.
What I am concerned with is that the individuals who built all of this software will be overwhelmed by the giant corporations. I did my best to keep that from happening and to keep everybody, including the corporation, happy about the resolution we came to. Yes, I think a valuable goal was achieved.
Yes, they have to really ship the source code. But taking 10 days (or a little longer, if that happens) to cut CDs and get them out the door is permissible.
I agree that any company that participates in the free software community should be scrutinized by the community, criticized when appropriate, and praised when they are doing the right thing. And this was an appropriate time to criticize them, and now they've done the right thing and it's time for us to praise them.
If I had my 'druthers, I'd make our criticism more polite and better organized, but I'd not eliminate it.
Well, some of us did do our best to talk to them constructively and politely, and to help them come to the right decision. We also did our best to put a damper on the panic, which was less than completely successful.
If I had my druthers, someone would post a rational argument regarding why something was wrong and then the vast multitude would chime in politely and help to get the change enacted. This time it wasn't quite that neat. I found John Goerzen's argument to be quite rational, but John didn't know how to take the next step - how to get their attention and get a negociation started first, so that he could say that was going on in his initial announcement. That would have damped down the panic response somewhat. But I ended up doing that stuff as soon as I heard what was happening, and it worked out OK.
Actually, GPL doesn't require you to publish if you are just working on something. If you distribute a binary version to someone, that someone and nobody else has the right to ask you for the source code, and you must comply. That someone then has the right to redistribute to other people, with the same obligation - give binary, must also give source on request. But that person can also elect to not distribute at all.
So, by promising to ship source to the testers to whom they've shipped binary, and by disambiguating that their beta agreement does not overlay terms onto someone else's GPL license, they are entirely fulfilling their obligations under the GPL.
Someone asked what distribution was: the conveyance of a copy from one legal entity to another.
Thanks
Bruce
They did the right thing. Now, give them a break!
on
Corel Clears the Air
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· Score: 5
This announcement is very satisfactory. I'm quite pleased.
There's an important rule to know if you want to be a successful agent for constructive change. Once people start doing what you want, stop complaining! Corel has done the right thing and should now be congratulated and praised.
They have made it clear that the beta agreement does not restrict the distribution of any Open Source code. Not just the GPL code, where there was a legal issue. That means they consider the desires of the community to be important - they've given us more than they really had to.
I think the criticism regarding the speed at which this took place is incorrect. Corel is a huge company, the biggest software company in Canada and one of the world's largest. For such a behemoth to change its course in 4 days is certainly not an unacceptable delay!
There's also criticism because they choose to not apply an Open Source license to some stand-alone products, not containing other people's code, until those products are finished. That's their perogative. I'm sure they'll experiment with open development, but as we've seen with Mozilla, it's difficult to get community participation on something that doesn't work yet. Only now that Mozilla is useful are we seeing significant contributions from outsiders.
And yes, they said some clueless things while this was going on, and even something that many took as insulting. But diplomacy means ignoring stuff like that and just concentrating on the goal. We achieved the goal, they understand now, they conceded. What went before that is irrelevant now.
OK, I'm willing to accept that it's not done that way any longer. I did write a lot of microcode for a baby supercomputer, a 4-datum SIMD called the Pixar Image Computer that was driven by a Sun or SGI, but that was 10 years ago. My surmise is that the vector processor is really a separate device from a general-purpose CPU, even if it's in the same box, but I'd be willing to be enlightened on that detail as well. Bruce
A supercomputer doesn't have what you'd consider an operating system. It's a front-end computer that does all I/O, provides the usual operating system services, and controls the supercomputer. Linux is perfectly practical for the front-end. It would be nice to see a Linux in there.
It's what is otherwise called an "array processor". You give it a big array (a vector) and it performs the same operation on every element of the entire array, very quickly. I've seen them used for image processing, but they are usable for many other sorts of problems. The concept has been around forever, of course they keep getting faster.
A WebDAV client could allow you to drag a document from the desktop onto your web server, to drag documents around on your web server, and to open a document on your web server directly into your editor.
You should, in fact, be able to write a remote filesystem client for the WebDAV protocol, and you could put it in the Linux kernel and make it work like the NFS or Samba client. That would WebDAV-enable a lot of Linux tools right away. Someone go do that and tell us when you're done:-).
And the V in DAV is for versioning, but I don't have a clue about how the versioning works.
Please don't take my comments regarding Zope as a deprecation of PHP. I just happen to be a satisfied Zope user, there could be PHP features just as nice that I'm not aware of.
And I understand there is not an existing license problem with PHP's open-sourceness. If that's not the case please explain.
I'd like to chime in regarding Zope. The scope of the problems it solves is simply awesome, and it's got an Open Source license approved by yours truly. The feature-list is quite impressive:
PHP-like language (called DTML), with new experimental XML-compliant form of DTML as well which can be handled by XML editors.
Managed via your web browser, there is no need to have a shell account to maintain a web site, and no need to be in the/etc/passwd file.
Access control including user-defined roles.
User information, roles, and permissions can be local to a sub-tree of a larger site, and can override what is defined higher in the tree.
Object persistence.
Content management with session control. You can join a session to test new content without having that content appear to anyone who has not joined that session. Commit or discard the session when you are done.
WebDAV (drag-and-drop management of web sites) works today. Too bad the only WebDAV client you can get is IE5, but that'll change - it's an open standard.
FTP access to your web site and its dynamic methods.
Database integration with built-in query system and sophisticated search interface.
No need for CGI. Export methods of classes via the web. Persistent program rather than CGI which restarts an executable with every call.
Transaction processing transparent to the programmer. If an uncaught error is posted during a transaction, the entire transaction is backed out of the database cleanly. Data is never left in an inconsistent state. There is also a programatic interface to transactions, but you don't generally have to use it.
It's pretty fast and low-overhead, too. My Pentium III 450 running Linux and Zope has survived being slashdotted many times. Sure, my Pentium 120 does that using just Apache, for static files. My Zope site, on the other hand, is very dynamic.
Web-based definition of classes, or you can use python.
Call from Apache, or run it as its own web server. If your site is entirely Zope, you can turn off Apache and save the overhead.
Multi-threaded.
Written in Python, with a tiny bit of C.
It takes a few days to learn everything that's in there, there's so much. I suggest you go over to zope.org and get started.
I think this is moot because the federal funding was not for the development of the distribution. It happens to contain some applications that were developed, separately from the distribution, with federal funding, but those were already released to the general public.
It would be interesting to look at the particular laws that require that "no federal funding" disclosure, but for now I'd consider this a non-problem.
I did not mean to belittle your concern. I do think it's important that the free software community take the opportunity to negociate whenever possible, rather than shooting first and asking questions later. We have to work this way if we're to be considered adults.
You know that I don't hide the fact when I think something's wrong in the free software world. If Corel doesn't solve the problem in a way I feel is satisfactory, I'll publish that fact in clear terms.
Remember that we are dealing with the biggest software company in Canada. They are liable to have "disconnects" between some of their staff and others. They had a P.R. person sending one message today while a manager was sending another. This is to be expected with big companies. The understanding that they have to be careful about these licenses is getting through to all concerned due to this incident. Give them some more time.
Thanks
Bruce
SGI should be recognized for their goood work
on
SGI Releases IDE
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· Score: 3
SGI is being an honest and productive participant in the Free Software community. Be nice to them and help them out! I wish Sun had SGI's policies regarding free software.
Well, I own the copyright of a significant portion of the code involved. You can't get more official than that, can you? But the "Officials Urge Calm" was meant to be a take-off on the usual messages regarding natural disasters, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
We are both alienating and alienated, but not autistic.
Bruce
I can't believe that Apple didn't know this, that can't be true. I used to be in touch with their spectrum-management person, though he might have left there by now. Certainly they are cognizant of the basics of radio regulation.
Besides AirPort, you can't operate CB, Family Radio service (the little 1/2 watt walkie-talkies that have recently become popular) and Transient Radio Service (the color dot system walkie-talkies) in other countries, in general. Some countries don't want you to operate your Inmarsat or other satellite telephone, though this is more rare. In some countries you might be able to license them, but you don't just cross a border and get on the radio without checking first, lest you get a rude visit from the military including equipment confiscation or even inprisonment as a spy in some places - no kidding. Hams have worked out an international license, but they must comply with each country's frequency and power limitations while they are there.
Bruce
I'd also be interested in hearing about any Free Software databases that can do this sort of synchronization. Thanks
Bruce
Well, unless they really broke Debian, it would have to be good. :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
However, just to be contentious, if you are not the person who gave them the binary, you don't necessarily have the complete source code. It could have been modified downstream. Nyah! :-)
We kept a really bad precedent from happening. You know the story about just letting the camel's nose into the tent, and then shortly afterward the entire camel is in the tent. Some day, some company is going to deliberately run rough-shod over our copyright rights, and we'll really have to defend ourselves. We could not allow the precedent that just a little violation was OK, for a little while. I don't believe the argument that there would have been no violation, either. The way I read the beta agreement, the GPL, and the definition of distributuion, there would have been a violation.
I am also very little concerned about scaring business away from Linux at this point. Business is all over us. Corel claims to be the world's second largest company in its market, just behind Microsoft. They can smell money as well as the next business.
What I am concerned with is that the individuals who built all of this software will be overwhelmed by the giant corporations. I did my best to keep that from happening and to keep everybody, including the corporation, happy about the resolution we came to. Yes, I think a valuable goal was achieved.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
If I had my 'druthers, I'd make our criticism more polite and better organized, but I'd not eliminate it.
Bruce
If I had my druthers, someone would post a rational argument regarding why something was wrong and then the vast multitude would chime in politely and help to get the change enacted. This time it wasn't quite that neat. I found John Goerzen's argument to be quite rational, but John didn't know how to take the next step - how to get their attention and get a negociation started first, so that he could say that was going on in his initial announcement. That would have damped down the panic response somewhat. But I ended up doing that stuff as soon as I heard what was happening, and it worked out OK.
Thanks
Bruce
So, by promising to ship source to the testers to whom they've shipped binary, and by disambiguating that their beta agreement does not overlay terms onto someone else's GPL license, they are entirely fulfilling their obligations under the GPL.
Someone asked what distribution was: the conveyance of a copy from one legal entity to another.
Thanks
Bruce
There's an important rule to know if you want to be a successful agent for constructive change. Once people start doing what you want, stop complaining! Corel has done the right thing and should now be congratulated and praised.
They have made it clear that the beta agreement does not restrict the distribution of any Open Source code. Not just the GPL code, where there was a legal issue. That means they consider the desires of the community to be important - they've given us more than they really had to.
I think the criticism regarding the speed at which this took place is incorrect. Corel is a huge company, the biggest software company in Canada and one of the world's largest. For such a behemoth to change its course in 4 days is certainly not an unacceptable delay!
There's also criticism because they choose to not apply an Open Source license to some stand-alone products, not containing other people's code, until those products are finished. That's their perogative. I'm sure they'll experiment with open development, but as we've seen with Mozilla, it's difficult to get community participation on something that doesn't work yet. Only now that Mozilla is useful are we seeing significant contributions from outsiders.
And yes, they said some clueless things while this was going on, and even something that many took as insulting. But diplomacy means ignoring stuff like that and just concentrating on the goal. We achieved the goal, they understand now, they conceded. What went before that is irrelevant now.
So, now it's time for us to encourage Corel.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
OK, I'm willing to accept that it's not done that way any longer. I did write a lot of microcode for a baby supercomputer, a 4-datum SIMD called the Pixar Image Computer that was driven by a Sun or SGI, but that was 10 years ago. My surmise is that the vector processor is really a separate device from a general-purpose CPU, even if it's in the same box, but I'd be willing to be enlightened on that detail as well. Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
You should, in fact, be able to write a remote filesystem client for the WebDAV protocol, and you could put it in the Linux kernel and make it work like the NFS or Samba client. That would WebDAV-enable a lot of Linux tools right away. Someone go do that and tell us when you're done :-) .
And the V in DAV is for versioning, but I don't have a clue about how the versioning works.
Thanks
Bruce
And I understand there is not an existing license problem with PHP's open-sourceness. If that's not the case please explain.
Thanks
Bruce
- PHP-like language (called DTML), with new experimental XML-compliant form of DTML as well which can be handled by XML editors.
- Managed via your web browser, there is no need to have a shell account to maintain a web site, and no need to be in the
/etc/passwd file. - Access control including user-defined roles.
- User information, roles, and permissions can be local to a sub-tree of a larger site, and can override what is defined higher in the tree.
- Object persistence.
- Content management with session control. You can join a session to test new content without having that content appear to anyone who has not joined that session. Commit or discard the session when you are done.
- WebDAV (drag-and-drop management of web sites) works today. Too bad the only WebDAV client you can get is IE5, but that'll change - it's an open standard.
- FTP access to your web site and its dynamic methods.
- Database integration with built-in query system and sophisticated search interface.
- No need for CGI. Export methods of classes via the web. Persistent program rather than CGI which restarts an executable with every call.
- Transaction processing transparent to the programmer. If an uncaught error is posted during a transaction, the entire transaction is backed out of the database cleanly. Data is never left in an inconsistent state. There is also a programatic interface to transactions, but you don't generally have to use it.
- It's pretty fast and low-overhead, too. My Pentium III 450 running Linux and Zope has survived being slashdotted many times. Sure, my Pentium 120 does that using just Apache, for static files. My Zope site, on the other hand, is very dynamic.
- Web-based definition of classes, or you can use python.
- Call from Apache, or run it as its own web server. If your site is entirely Zope, you can turn off Apache and save the overhead.
- Multi-threaded.
- Written in Python, with a tiny bit of C.
It takes a few days to learn everything that's in there, there's so much. I suggest you go over to zope.org and get started.Thanks
Bruce
It would be interesting to look at the particular laws that require that "no federal funding" disclosure, but for now I'd consider this a non-problem.
Thanks
Bruce
You know that I don't hide the fact when I think something's wrong in the free software world. If Corel doesn't solve the problem in a way I feel is satisfactory, I'll publish that fact in clear terms.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Thanks
Bruce Perens