On the other hand, if you do distribute GPL licensed code, then everything distributed with it must be GPL (or under a license that follows the rules of GPL). This is the reason why you don't see closed source binaries distributed with Linux distributions.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. Clause 2 of the GPL explicitly permits distribution together with proprietary software: "mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
You don't see closed-source binaries distributed with many Linux distributions because many Linux distributions are run by people with a philosophical objection to closed-source binaries. However, you will find that some distributions, such as Linspire, most certainly do include closed-source binaries.
Because closed-source code doesn't try to pretend it is available for source-level availability, as open-source frequently does.
It's not "pretending". It really is. You then have the choice of whether or not to actually take up that offer, and if you decide to leave the source code well alone and just use the tool "as is", then you are safe from any potential infection. Easy, isn't it?
There are potentially _significant_ and _far reaching_ effects of using GPLed source code in other software that are frequently glossed over by its advocates.
Very true. And that's a very good reason for companies to be wary of using GPLed source code. But I don't see why it's a reason for companies to be wary of using GPLed software.
Disingenuous comparisons with using source code from closed-source products will not change this, not matter how frequently they are made. Closed-source products typically do not even try to pretend their source is available for viewing, let alone possible use.
Many don't; some do. Microsoft's "shared source" programme is an interesting example; I wonder how wary companies are of it?
But the simple fact remains that there is a big problem, which is that companies are unnecessarily restricting the use of open-source programs, when legal liabilities typically only arise with the use of source code or libraries. Yes, it's disingenuous to pretend that source code from closed-source products is just as available as that from open-source products. But it's just as disingenous to pretend, as you constantly do, that open-source products shove source code down your programmers' throats. It's quite simple to benefit from the cost savings and efficiency savings that open-source software can provide, without in any way opening yourself up to legal liability. For example, deploying OpenOffice.org and Firefox as part of your company's standard desktop build is in no way going to risk contaminating your own products or opening you up to any sort of liability whatsoever.
I find it amusing that you are lambasting OSS advocates for constantly harping on about source code availability, and yet you fall into the same trap yourself!
You have referred to "using" Spring, but it's not as simple as that. What if I downloaded Spring, renamed it and sold it to my client as my own work? I would be in trouble.
Ditto if you renamed and resold a proprietary product. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a problem with open source software.
If you use any open source code in your company's software, your failure to comply with the legal conditions for doing so (such as the GPL) can and will put you in close communication with your lawyers if the original coder ever finds out you've ripped his code in secret.
Ditto if you use any proprietary code without complying with the conditions. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a problem with open source software.
These companies are not under any false impressions. They have every right to seek legal advice to protect themselves from being liable to pay damages under intellectual property law.
Perhaps they should be more concerned about the violation of proprietary licenses, which - due to their greater complexity and more restrictive terms - are much easier to violate accidentally, and much more likely to lead to expensive lawsuits. How many companies can honestly say that they don't have a single bit of unlicensed software on their systems? Are you sure you deleted all that trial software after the trial period expired? Are you sure you're only using 50 copies of that software at a time? No, wait, maybe you were only allowed 50 unique users in total. Or was it 50 workstations? Damn, better get legal to check again...
I know that if I were responsible for setting out a corporate IT policy, I would - for example - mandate the use of an open source tool like 7-zip for data compression, to avoid the risk that the company might use unlicensed copies of WinZIP and open itself up to being liable to pay damages under intellectual property law. Seems to me that using freely copyable software is a simple and economical way to protect oneself from accidental copyright infringement. But who am I to comment? My hair isn't pointy.
Does that now mean that any Perl script that "includes" mine is now subject to the GPL? How big does an "inclusion" have to be to trigger the GPL? One line of code? Ten? One hundred?
It's not a question of size; it's a question of creativity. Copyright protects original expressions, not things that are functionally required to take the form they do.
So, if your program merely turned warnings and strictness on, but did so in a clever or obfuscated way, or used some kind of unusual formatting, then it would be protected by copyright and anyone who copied it would indeed have to license their work under the GPL or risk a lawsuit for infringing your copyright. But since the sample you posted merely does so in the standard way that millions of programmers use every day, there is not a trace of original expression in it, and consequently it is not protected by copyright.
(IANAL, of course, but this is hardly rocket science.)
In my experience "tool" generally refers to a program or utility, not a library. E.g. using Subversion instead of MS SourceSafe, or Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, or the GNU coreutils instead of the restrictive equivalents that come with most Unixes.
All these are perfectly safe things that short-sighted management could nonetheless easily rule out on the grounds that "open source is dangerous" - a position they adopt because they've been mislead by comments like yours into believing that any use of OSS risks contaminating their entire codebase, when in reality the only risky activity is linking against virally licensed libraries.
libertarians also oppose government welfare because it is unconstitutional for the government to confiscate the property of one and give it to another. it is also crippling to those who recieve as well as it destroys their initiative.
I'll ignore the "unconstitutional" bit, because I live outside the USA and regard your country's worship of its constitution with bemusement. Discussions of what's right and wrong should be based on logical arguments, not on what some bit of paper says.
I will, however, contest the second part of your argument. I took welfare payments for about 9 months at one point. Far from "destroying my initiative", it gave me time to consolidate my skills and set myself up in business. Without welfare, I'd have had no option but to take a minimum-wage, maximum-hours job, which would have destroyed my initiative, robbed me of the free time I was able to capitalize on to put my business together, and basically condemned me to a life of poverty.
So, socialist welfare liberated me, while "libertarianism" would have enslaved me? I think I'll stick with socialism, thanks.
no, you just have people who have spare computers or lots of spare processing time, offer up free accounts on said computers.
"Hey, hackers! Wanna try out your 0-day privilege escalation attacks? Here's a username and password to my computer on this IP address! Don't worry about brute-forcing the root password, I've got plenty of spare processing time!"
The world has changed since RMS let people use his MIT account. Sorry, but in this day and age, unless you're a security expert, you'd be asking for trouble donating any kind of access to a project like this.
You are correct, of course, that WoW is software-as-a-service in a sense. However, it relies on a rich client application built in a low-level programming language compiled to platform-specific binaries, so it's very, very different from the kind of thing the originator of this thread had in mind.
WoW is also different because its design is dictated by the type of software it is. You simply can't have an massively multiplayer game that doesn't rely on network connectivity. But there's nothing in the nature of a word processor that requires it to be delivered as a service.
Another interesting example might be the Half-Life 2 type of thing, which is moving in the direction of online delivery of gaming content that isn't in any way inherently online. But even that is reliant on low-level platform-specific code, and only uses the online component to deliver that code to your computer. So, arguably software-as-a-service, but a world away from web applications.
As it stands now, there is very little that traditional software does that can't be replicated on the web using the right technology.
So why isn't it being done?
Where is the web-based Word? (Google Docs is a web-based Wordpad which lacks even basic features like search-and-replace.)
Where is the web-based Photoshop?
Where are the modern web-based games? (Flash is just about capable of replicating the high points of the late 1980s.)
Where is the web-based web browser?:P
Face it... you might be able to do anything with the right technology. But for most things, the web is the wrong technology. Rich client apps are certainly here to stay, and you can bet your life most of them will be compiled in some way.
Software as a service is slowly becoming a reality and compiled software is soon to go the way of the dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years. I suspect you are right, and compiled software will, indeed, do much the same thing. (Particularly if that Skynet project gets off the ground.)
As for software-as-a-service - no thanks. I like my software free, not rented or ad-supported.
This is true.. how many operating systems are in wide use for most applications these days?
We have... Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD.
All of them in numerous different versions, and in the case of OS X, Linux, and BSD, running on a variety of hardware. (There's still PLENTY of PPC-based Macs around, for one.)
I spose there's still people working with Sun/Solaris and HP/UX and AIX
Damn right. More than you'd think, in fact.
but for the most part, open source devs care that it works on their stuff, and to heck with whatever else.
Do you consider this an attitude to be encouraged?
And even if you don't see a problem with it, what about those OS devs who do actually kind of like the idea of testing on a variety of hardware? There aren't many hobbyists who can afford to buy servers from HP and IBM.
Can't we just let that wretched language die already?
Not until you find a better alternative that provides the same performance.
Yes, there are still plenty of performance-critical applications. I sure wouldn't want to run an OS written in Python, or a movie compressor written in Ruby. Heck, many such things are still written in C; you should be damn grateful even C++ gets a look-in...
You win the topic. Everything else is masturbation.
You're missing the point that it's not just about me solving my problems. Other people's problems are also relevant to me, since I have to use software written by other people every day. So it is perfectly sensible and valid for me to be interested in whether other people are making full use of the problem-solving tools available to them, because if they do, the software I have to use will be cheaper, available sooner, and more reliable.
I have heard people say they want this for hardware compatibility reasons. Like if Linux came on a Dell, then all the hardware would be compatible. It seems to me though, the solution is not for Dell to use parts that Linux supports, but for Linux to support the parts that Dell is using (to any reasonable extend).
It already does. But you know full well that isn't the problem, because in your very next paragraph you go on to complain:
For most things, something like Ubuntu works fine, but your average person isn't going to know what to do if their wireless card isn't working, or if they don't have support for MP3s, etc. Editing a bunch of configuration files and such is not an option. They want to click a few things and have everything work.
Or have everything preinstalled, at which point it will just work without them having to click anything! That is the whole point of wanting preinstalled Linux: Dell could trivially arrange for the wireless card to be set up already; Dell could trivially arrange for MP3 and DVD playback to work out of the box (by the simple expedient of paying the license fees required to make it legal).
If the big problem facing Linux today is that it's too damn hard to get it working, then is it not blatantly obvious that the solution is to sell computers that are already properly configured?
Well at least parody is still legal in the US. Is anyone else surprised how repressive Australia and the UK can be?
Which country was it that came up with the idea of "free speech zones"? Which country invented the concept of legal enforcement of DRM? Which country came up with the idea of patenting software, business methods, and living creatures? Which country pioneered suing people for ludicrously inflated damages on the merest suspicion of their kids possibly having downloaded an MP3 once?
You might want to be a little careful pointing out motes in other people's eyes, brother...
As the original article in that earlier discussion noted, if we'd use the appropriate term when discussing these issues, it's more likely that people will realize that understanding evolution is essential to understand this
Silly. It's perfectly obvious that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are specially created by an intelligent designer who is really, really wishing he'd never made that silly promise to Noah.
Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 4, Informative
how do we know how anything was pronounced in the ancient world?
We don't, but historical linguistics is like any other science - we can try to find the theories that best explain the available evidence, and refine those over time as new ideas are developed.
Did the Romans produce a Latin dictionary with IPA transliterations for each word?
No, but they did many other useful things, like transliterate words between languages and scripts; e.g. writing Latin names in the Greek alphabet and vice versa, or writing Celtic and Germanic names in the Latin alphabet. This doesn't tell us much about the actual sounds the alphabets represented, but it tells us about their relationships, and reduces the number of plausible solutions for ancient pronunciation.
For a simple example, "Caesar" was regularly written in Greek as the equivalent of "kaisar", not as "saisar" or "saizar". The fact that different Greek letters were chosen to represent the different Latin letters implies that they represented different sounds. From considering all the other evidence, we find that the solution that is most consistent with the observed facts is the one that has Greek kappa and Latin C pronounced like an English K; therefore we conclude that "Caesar" was pronounced with a "k" sound, and it also seems reasonable to assume that "caetera" was consistent with that.
- Installed on most machines by default (many policies prohibit the installation of new s/w)
And if web apps ever get beyond the "cool but impractical demo" phase they're in at the moment, you can bet your life those policies will be updated to restrict their use as well. So, again, what's the advantage?
Lets say you want to do a research on the effects of MSG on Obesity You will find that the wiki denies it. "There is no evidence that MSG causes obesity in humans." This could very well be the fact that MSG is billion dollar industry and any Ajimoto can very well afford to pay a "crowd" to maintain that MSG is safe.
Alternatively, it could just possibly be because there is no evidence that MSG causes obesity in humans.
(If MSG causes obesity in humans, then why have China and Japan historically had very low obesity levels, and even today they have far less of an obesity problem than America, despite those cultures having used MSG extensively for far longer than it's been common in the USA? Methinks Americans are eating too much and exercising too little, and trying desperately to find something - anything - to let them avoid taking responsibility for their own unhealthy lifestyles...)
In ML (which, like Lisp, is a functional language), '=' is used for both equality tests and assignment.
To be pedantic, the assignment operators are ':=' and '<-' (depending on the dialect and the context).
'=' is used for equality tests and binding, which is not quite the same thing as assignment. (To oversimplify greatly and also distort the truth somewhat, you can think of the expression "let foo = 1 in..." as meaning "the equality test 'foo = 1' may be assumed to be true for...")
How good can the quality of the translated subtitles be if some fanboy has it done on the same day?!
In the days when I used to watch them, it used to be excruciatingly poor, with cringeworthy translation errors, unreadably wooden dialogue, and typos galore; most of the effort usually seemed to be put into dancing animated karaoke lyrics for the opening song, rather than actually translating the script well. I glimpse the odd screen capture on blogs and so forth from time to time, and it doesn't look like things have improved much.
Fortunately for the subbers, their audience is not very discriminating.
But it is tricky to use for any language other than English. Out of the box, it's English or nothing. Other European languages are complicated; more complex languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Chinese require some very involved hacks indeed.
It can be done, some of the time, but it's very, very easy to mess up. I have tried numerous times to get Japanese support, using one of the several special Japanese versions that exist (it seems it simply can't be done with standard TeX), and only once did I manage to generate a DVI - which I was unable to convert to a usable format, because doing so always stripped out all Japanese text, for some reason I never managed to fathom.
And this is all fair enough, because TeX was written to scratch Knuth's itch, and therefore it does what Knuth needed very well: it's brilliant for typesetting English and mathematics. Unfortunately that doesn't make it the solution to all the world's typesetting problems.
I hate to say it, but "inferior" products like MS Word, OpenOffice.org, etc. have supported Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese perfectly for as long as I can remember. Largely because they use Unicode internally, rather than one of the numerous inadequate and non-standard encodings that TeX and its derivatives rely on.
To be fair, there's a Unicode version of TeX called Omega or some such. I'd doubtless have found it very useful if I'd ever managed to get it to work at all.
Their generation's sacrifice, every single last one of them appears to be in vein. For we've become the very thing we fought sixty years ago.
You are insulting and belittling the very generation you purport to admire, by claiming that the Naziism they stood up to was nothing more frightening than a handful of cameras and some people tapping phones.
Where are the cattle trucks transporting British Jews to gas chambers? Where are the brainwashed militias goose-stepping through the streets? Where are the ghettoes, the slave labour, the mass murder of protesters, the censorship of the press? Where are the prisoners facing horrific "medical" experiments? Where are the jackbooted secret police dragging people away to face torture and execution?
That generation faced horrors and hells that you can scarcely imagine. You merely face surveillance cameras (horror of horrors - if you go out in public, people might see you!), ID cards (not obviously useful, but not obviously evil either), and phone tapping (which has always gone on; at least in the UK it is strictly regulated, which is why you have a number here in the first place). Sorry, but there is no comparison, and to suggest that Britain today is even remotely similar to Germany in 1939 is to insult not just our government and police, but also every brave man or woman who fell victim to the Nazi regime or sacrificed their lives to destroy it.
Who cares? The only great Dune novel was the first, and the series stopped being worth reading at all after the next two; the rest was just a shapeless mess of increasingly gratuitous sex scenes mixed up with substandard philosophy.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't see closed-source binaries distributed with many Linux distributions because many Linux distributions are run by people with a philosophical objection to closed-source binaries. However, you will find that some distributions, such as Linspire, most certainly do include closed-source binaries.
But the simple fact remains that there is a big problem, which is that companies are unnecessarily restricting the use of open-source programs, when legal liabilities typically only arise with the use of source code or libraries. Yes, it's disingenuous to pretend that source code from closed-source products is just as available as that from open-source products. But it's just as disingenous to pretend, as you constantly do, that open-source products shove source code down your programmers' throats. It's quite simple to benefit from the cost savings and efficiency savings that open-source software can provide, without in any way opening yourself up to legal liability. For example, deploying OpenOffice.org and Firefox as part of your company's standard desktop build is in no way going to risk contaminating your own products or opening you up to any sort of liability whatsoever.
I find it amusing that you are lambasting OSS advocates for constantly harping on about source code availability, and yet you fall into the same trap yourself!
I know that if I were responsible for setting out a corporate IT policy, I would - for example - mandate the use of an open source tool like 7-zip for data compression, to avoid the risk that the company might use unlicensed copies of WinZIP and open itself up to being liable to pay damages under intellectual property law. Seems to me that using freely copyable software is a simple and economical way to protect oneself from accidental copyright infringement. But who am I to comment? My hair isn't pointy.
So, if your program merely turned warnings and strictness on, but did so in a clever or obfuscated way, or used some kind of unusual formatting, then it would be protected by copyright and anyone who copied it would indeed have to license their work under the GPL or risk a lawsuit for infringing your copyright. But since the sample you posted merely does so in the standard way that millions of programmers use every day, there is not a trace of original expression in it, and consequently it is not protected by copyright.
(IANAL, of course, but this is hardly rocket science.)
All these are perfectly safe things that short-sighted management could nonetheless easily rule out on the grounds that "open source is dangerous" - a position they adopt because they've been mislead by comments like yours into believing that any use of OSS risks contaminating their entire codebase, when in reality the only risky activity is linking against virally licensed libraries.
I will, however, contest the second part of your argument. I took welfare payments for about 9 months at one point. Far from "destroying my initiative", it gave me time to consolidate my skills and set myself up in business. Without welfare, I'd have had no option but to take a minimum-wage, maximum-hours job, which would have destroyed my initiative, robbed me of the free time I was able to capitalize on to put my business together, and basically condemned me to a life of poverty.
So, socialist welfare liberated me, while "libertarianism" would have enslaved me? I think I'll stick with socialism, thanks.
The world has changed since RMS let people use his MIT account. Sorry, but in this day and age, unless you're a security expert, you'd be asking for trouble donating any kind of access to a project like this.
WoW is also different because its design is dictated by the type of software it is. You simply can't have an massively multiplayer game that doesn't rely on network connectivity. But there's nothing in the nature of a word processor that requires it to be delivered as a service.
Another interesting example might be the Half-Life 2 type of thing, which is moving in the direction of online delivery of gaming content that isn't in any way inherently online. But even that is reliant on low-level platform-specific code, and only uses the online component to deliver that code to your computer. So, arguably software-as-a-service, but a world away from web applications.
Where is the web-based Word? (Google Docs is a web-based Wordpad which lacks even basic features like search-and-replace.)
Where is the web-based Photoshop?
Where are the modern web-based games? (Flash is just about capable of replicating the high points of the late 1980s.)
Where is the web-based web browser?
Face it... you might be able to do anything with the right technology. But for most things, the web is the wrong technology. Rich client apps are certainly here to stay, and you can bet your life most of them will be compiled in some way.The dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years. I suspect you are right, and compiled software will, indeed, do much the same thing. (Particularly if that Skynet project gets off the ground.)
As for software-as-a-service - no thanks. I like my software free, not rented or ad-supported.
And even if you don't see a problem with it, what about those OS devs who do actually kind of like the idea of testing on a variety of hardware? There aren't many hobbyists who can afford to buy servers from HP and IBM.
Yes, there are still plenty of performance-critical applications. I sure wouldn't want to run an OS written in Python, or a movie compressor written in Ruby. Heck, many such things are still written in C; you should be damn grateful even C++ gets a look-in...
If the big problem facing Linux today is that it's too damn hard to get it working, then is it not blatantly obvious that the solution is to sell computers that are already properly configured?
Which country invented the concept of legal enforcement of DRM?
Which country came up with the idea of patenting software, business methods, and living creatures?
Which country pioneered suing people for ludicrously inflated damages on the merest suspicion of their kids possibly having downloaded an MP3 once?
You might want to be a little careful pointing out motes in other people's eyes, brother...
We don't, but historical linguistics is like any other science - we can try to find the theories that best explain the available evidence, and refine those over time as new ideas are developed.No, but they did many other useful things, like transliterate words between languages and scripts; e.g. writing Latin names in the Greek alphabet and vice versa, or writing Celtic and Germanic names in the Latin alphabet. This doesn't tell us much about the actual sounds the alphabets represented, but it tells us about their relationships, and reduces the number of plausible solutions for ancient pronunciation.
For a simple example, "Caesar" was regularly written in Greek as the equivalent of "kaisar", not as "saisar" or "saizar". The fact that different Greek letters were chosen to represent the different Latin letters implies that they represented different sounds. From considering all the other evidence, we find that the solution that is most consistent with the observed facts is the one that has Greek kappa and Latin C pronounced like an English K; therefore we conclude that "Caesar" was pronounced with a "k" sound, and it also seems reasonable to assume that "caetera" was consistent with that.
(If MSG causes obesity in humans, then why have China and Japan historically had very low obesity levels, and even today they have far less of an obesity problem than America, despite those cultures having used MSG extensively for far longer than it's been common in the USA? Methinks Americans are eating too much and exercising too little, and trying desperately to find something - anything - to let them avoid taking responsibility for their own unhealthy lifestyles...)
'=' is used for equality tests and binding, which is not quite the same thing as assignment. (To oversimplify greatly and also distort the truth somewhat, you can think of the expression "let foo = 1 in
Fortunately for the subbers, their audience is not very discriminating.
It can be done, some of the time, but it's very, very easy to mess up. I have tried numerous times to get Japanese support, using one of the several special Japanese versions that exist (it seems it simply can't be done with standard TeX), and only once did I manage to generate a DVI - which I was unable to convert to a usable format, because doing so always stripped out all Japanese text, for some reason I never managed to fathom.
And this is all fair enough, because TeX was written to scratch Knuth's itch, and therefore it does what Knuth needed very well: it's brilliant for typesetting English and mathematics. Unfortunately that doesn't make it the solution to all the world's typesetting problems.
I hate to say it, but "inferior" products like MS Word, OpenOffice.org, etc. have supported Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese perfectly for as long as I can remember. Largely because they use Unicode internally, rather than one of the numerous inadequate and non-standard encodings that TeX and its derivatives rely on.
To be fair, there's a Unicode version of TeX called Omega or some such. I'd doubtless have found it very useful if I'd ever managed to get it to work at all.
Where are the cattle trucks transporting British Jews to gas chambers? Where are the brainwashed militias goose-stepping through the streets? Where are the ghettoes, the slave labour, the mass murder of protesters, the censorship of the press? Where are the prisoners facing horrific "medical" experiments? Where are the jackbooted secret police dragging people away to face torture and execution?
That generation faced horrors and hells that you can scarcely imagine. You merely face surveillance cameras (horror of horrors - if you go out in public, people might see you!), ID cards (not obviously useful, but not obviously evil either), and phone tapping (which has always gone on; at least in the UK it is strictly regulated, which is why you have a number here in the first place). Sorry, but there is no comparison, and to suggest that Britain today is even remotely similar to Germany in 1939 is to insult not just our government and police, but also every brave man or woman who fell victim to the Nazi regime or sacrificed their lives to destroy it.
Who cares? The only great Dune novel was the first, and the series stopped being worth reading at all after the next two; the rest was just a shapeless mess of increasingly gratuitous sex scenes mixed up with substandard philosophy.