Yeah, the FSF's GPL FAQ even states that the "OS Exception" covers the payware VisualBasic runtime... which implies it basically includes anything that comes from a development tool vendor. You wonder what the point was supposed to be.
The FSF's position is more expansive than that. They say that it is illegal to distribute software that links with GPL libraries, even if you aren't distributing the libraries themselves.
So, according to them, you can't write a closed source program and say "Use the copies of Readline and QT3 that came with your Linux distribution." because that would be a copyright violation.
Other than that, I think we're in agreement.
> All right, you'll have to cite where in the license it doesn't allow you to do that.
There's nothing to cite. The Windows EULA doesn't mention derived works or how you can use the libraries (unlike the [L]GPL).
No, I understand the licence. Thanks anyways for the free lecture, professor.
What I don't understnad is the FSF's position. A Derived Work is a two-way street - it requires both sides' permission to distribute. The FSF's position creates a contradiction where it is OK to do something with Microsoft's DLLs when it's not OK to do it with their own DLLs.
Furthermore I'm fairly sure that Microsoft, Apply, and Sun give you the right to link to the.DLL's in the EULA (otherwise, the OS would be mighty useless).
Nope. The Windows licence does not. This means one of two things:
(A) All third party Windows software is illegal, or (B) The FSF (and your) position on the matter is wrong.
The reality is that any court is going to choose Option B here. As long as the libraries aren't being illegally distrubed, there is probably little one can do to stop someone from linking to them. (Other than imposing a EULA.)
You failed to understand the point. The (L)GPL can not grant rights held by Microsoft, Apple, or Sun.
If the FSF can control runtime use because Linking==Copyright Infringment, so can anyone else. But they don't because the commercial software world does not interpret copyright law in this way.
Seems to me that you are arguing that a legal loophole allows you a result that is explicity against what the GPL intends:
(Preamble) We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
(7) For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
You might be right, but the FSF obviously though those clauses were meaningful or they wouldn't be in there.
(I know that the typical Linux Nerd wants his media software (L)GPLed, but the FSF intent was to prohibit these sorts of applicaitons from the Free Software realm.)
Re:The GPL/LGPL worries me....
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Re: your link.
The first issue is they're saying "What we meant" rather than "What we said". The LGPL does contain a bunch of legal language specific to C-style linking, which might not be good enough in a legal dispute over a Java program.
But the real problem with the LGPL is this:
It has always been the FSF's position that dynamically linking applications to libraries creates a single work derived from both the library code and the application code.
The problem with this position, if held up, it would effectively make 3rd party applications illegal on commercial OSes like Windows/Mac/Unix.
For example, Emacs for Windows dynamaically links to Windows DLLs. Therefore, according to the FSF, WinEmacs is a derived work of MS Windows, and therefore can not be distributed without Microsoft's permission. Well obviously that isn't the legal reality.
The LGPL is deeply based on this unusual interpretation of software copyright law. Which wouldn't be a big deal if was a "EULA", but it's unclear if it is or not.
Re:The GPL should be a little friendler.
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Making it difficult to connect applications together because one is not under the GPL and doesn't want to be.
The GPL doesn't make this difficult, it is the ambiguous definition of derived software works under copyright law. Until some court lays down some strict rules, this is a problem for everyone integrating different pieces of software.
Admittedly, RMS/FSF hasn't helped the situation by postulating a bunch of made-up informal rules based on "linking" when the legal reality is probably much more subtle (for example, the Linux Nvidia driver).
The issue is that it intentionally eliminates GPL for certain types of software.
For example, you can't write a GPL MP3 encoder and say "Please obtain the appropriate patent licence from MP3 Inc.". Instead the GPL itself makes it illegal to distribute it anywhere where the MP3 patents are enforced. (but people do it anyway)
I think the OP's fear is that you could get stuck with retroactively illegal GPL software even if you are willing to licence the patents.
I think the main issue is that Gnome and Mozilla moved to simplier interface with no easy way to get back to the old UI. At least with the new MS interfaces a little twiddling can get them back to 1995-style.
> Joe Schmoe also uses MS Word,... There is absolutely no hint that anybody gets turned off by features in the configuration
Compare the default UIs of Word 6.0 with Word 2003. Same functionality, but the latter is much simplier -- less toolbars, hidden menu items, taskbars instead of dialogs, etc.
I don't want to argue about "better", just that Joe Shmoe obviously believes that stripped down UIs are more accessible and therefore more popular than ones heavy with little used "nerd options". Obviously the Firefox devs are thinking this way.
The Netscape versions of the Mozilla appsuite did recieve tons of marketing hype (at that point Mozilla was a division of AOL). I wouldn't kid myself, the people pushing this don't really care about security, except for as a comparison issue with Internet Explorer.
Well obviously newspaper advertisng has some place, or IBM and Microsoft wouldn't be doing it. The thing is that the big guys are following up the mass media bombardment with targetted direct mailings (that have more info), and then following up those with sales calls.
I guess the assumption is that the IT department is going to be making an internal pitch for Firefox, and the CIO would say "Oh, I've heard of that... somewhere". But due to the lack of coordination this seems iffy.
It seems to me that the money would have been better spent on web banner ads, because at least people could 'convert' right their on the spot. It's not like people read newspapers in front of their computer.
Actually, a lot of the security in Firefox was patched on after the fact.
For example, older releases of FF/Mozilla had a ActiveX-type system that could popup an "Install Me" box when you visited a web page. When spyware makers started to abuse this, Mozilla simply changed the policy so it was impossible.
But, the only reason they could get away with this is that the feature had so few legitimate users outside of 1 or 2 known websites. If Microsoft did something similar, they would break thousands of legitimate applicaitons (this is where the popularity/installedbase argument comes into play).
Don't get me wrong -- FF did the right thing reacting quickly to Spyware installers, but it was still an after-the-fact reaction to a poorly designed feature.
The old argument about Mozilla was not that it was "Secure by Design", but that it was "A Great Developer Platform". Developer Platform means extendibility means opportunity for hacks/spyware. There's always going to be interesting new applications of the extentions/XUL stuff that Mozilla will have to keep an eye on.
> Yes, it certainly doesn't do a very good job of propagating ignorance does it?
Typical kneejerk smarter-than-thou nerd response. If people don't read the ad, it doesn't do a very good job of NOT propagating ignorance. This is marketing after all, not a man page.
People do know what a "web browser" is, but it isn't the immediate emotional conneciton they have to the Internet. ie, they think "I'm going to surf the web", not "I shall open my web browser program."
Not to mention that there's strong evidence that people are NOT fed up with Internet Explorer, or it wouldn't have had such a dominating marketshare over the last 5 years. The people fed up with IE have already switched to something else, the ad seems to be preaching to the converted.
"Are you looking for a better way to surf the web?" would've been more accessible and would actually give the typical IE user a reason to look at Firefox.
> Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender
Yet, Windows NT 4.0 basically killed the UNIX Workstation market dead. It might not have been as solid as UNIX (which was more debatable in the mid-90s), but it certainly was playing in the same ballpark unlike DOS or OS/2. By the time Win2000 came out, the Unix world had long given up on Workstations except for token efforts from Sun.
No suprise, because the Unix world's reaction to Windows NT was to roll-over. When NT came out in 1993, they reacted by killing development of Mofif/CDE and X11. Which is the big reason Linux has a tough time on the "desktop" -- they were handed a bunch of 10 year old technology that wasn't necessarily the best design in the first place.
Sorry for the late reply, but I was rereading and I noticed something:
Now - is that idemnification needed? I personally find it questionable. But then, I question a certain amount of the perceieved need for "support" too.
Every computer system needs some level of "support", no questions. The issue is that local expert/Google/IRC/Forum support often makes vendor phone support unnecessary, especially for simple/common configurations.
On the other hand, Linux might go for 20 years without a patent problem appearing. In fact if OSRM was certain there was a particular patent problem with Linux, they probably wouldn't be offering the service in the first place.
So I don't see the pitches as being all that similar. As Rumsfeld said, there's things you known you don't know (support) and then there's things you don't know you don't know (patents).
> they parse as XML, applying all of XML's constraints
And this benefits the guy reading ESPN.com how?
> no spec anywhere says that browsers have to support [progressive rendering]
Also, no spec says it shouldn't take 60 seconds for your home page to load or that you shouldn't start a popup storm on the user's system. Your preference for hidden protocol details over an optimal user experience makes you seem a bit quacky here. You might want to rethink your position.
> Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has a validating XML parser to draw on (MSXML), but for some reason won't put it to use
Yes, IE sucks. However, you seem to be suggesting that it suck more by misadvertising it's features.
> In fact, you lose the eXtensibility of XHTML when you don't serve it as XML
Not at all. Your client applicaiton can still treat the page as XML no matter what the MIME type is. The type is a useful hint, that's all.
> use XSLT at the last step to transform to HTML 4.01 Strict
Is there some part of XHTML that is invalid HTML? This seems unnecessary. Not that neccessity would enter into your thinking.
Best practice here is to use some form of content negotiation to send application/xhtml+xml to user-agents which support it.
This MIME type defeats progressive rendering in Mozilla, which makes the page appear much more slowly. Good reason not to use it on a commercial site -- HTML is just much better supported than XHTML even among the few browsers that care about XHTML at all.
No version of Internet Explorer ever released on any platform anywhere is capable of dealing with that MIME-type.
You miss the forest from the trees. IE doesn't support XHTML, So, IE is actually correctly not accepting a MIME type that it can't support. The fact that other browsers lie about their XHTML support makes it easier for developers, but it is not necessarily "correct".
Ultimately it's just a MIME type, nothing more. The abstract benefits of XHTML* are all still just as valid even if for practical reasons it's served with the wrong type.
* The real value with XHTML is content managment systems and parsing scripts. Graphical Web Browsers do such a damn good job with HTML parsing that there's very little payback delivering 100% XHTML to eyeballs.
The whining is the only reason that Mac has a somewhat decent game library. Mac users are loud, but they back it up with $$$. And there's certain things (Half-Life port being cancelled right before release) that deserve to be whined about.
Compare this to Linux users -- Oh Quake III for Linux was delayed two weeks so I had to buy the Windows version, the bastards.
Unfortunately, the threading support in Outlook and Notes is pretty bad. Not to mention that I've got better things to fight about than how my boss uses has his Inbox configured.
Generally, I trim off the irrelvant information on the bottom of the reply chain. However, recently I was emailing this CYA-Asshole who would actually paste the entire reply history back in to the email, including the parts that made him look like an idiot.
Crusading for Usenet netiquette in corporate mail is a lost cause, but/. is the home of lost technological causes, so I'm behind you here.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the FSF's GPL FAQ even states that the "OS Exception" covers the payware VisualBasic runtime ... which implies it basically includes anything that comes from a development tool vendor. You wonder what the point was supposed to be.
The FSF's position is more expansive than that. They say that it is illegal to distribute software that links with GPL libraries, even if you aren't distributing the libraries themselves.
So, according to them, you can't write a closed source program and say "Use the copies of Readline and QT3 that came with your Linux distribution." because that would be a copyright violation.
Other than that, I think we're in agreement.
> All right, you'll have to cite where in the license it doesn't allow you to do that.
There's nothing to cite. The Windows EULA doesn't mention derived works or how you can use the libraries (unlike the [L]GPL).
You fail to understand the license
.DLL's in the EULA (otherwise, the OS would be mighty useless).
No, I understand the licence. Thanks anyways for the free lecture, professor.
What I don't understnad is the FSF's position. A Derived Work is a two-way street - it requires both sides' permission to distribute. The FSF's position creates a contradiction where it is OK to do something with Microsoft's DLLs when it's not OK to do it with their own DLLs.
Furthermore I'm fairly sure that Microsoft, Apply, and Sun give you the right to link to the
Nope. The Windows licence does not. This means one of two things:
(A) All third party Windows software is illegal, or
(B) The FSF (and your) position on the matter is wrong.
The reality is that any court is going to choose Option B here. As long as the libraries aren't being illegally distrubed, there is probably little one can do to stop someone from linking to them. (Other than imposing a EULA.)
You failed to understand the point. The (L)GPL can not grant rights held by Microsoft, Apple, or Sun.
If the FSF can control runtime use because Linking==Copyright Infringment, so can anyone else. But they don't because the commercial software world does not interpret copyright law in this way.
Seems to me that you are arguing that a legal loophole allows you a result that is explicity against what the GPL intends:
(Preamble) We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
(7) For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
You might be right, but the FSF obviously though those clauses were meaningful or they wouldn't be in there.
(I know that the typical Linux Nerd wants his media software (L)GPLed, but the FSF intent was to prohibit these sorts of applicaitons from the Free Software realm.)
Re: your link.
The first issue is they're saying "What we meant" rather than "What we said". The LGPL does contain a bunch of legal language specific to C-style linking, which might not be good enough in a legal dispute over a Java program.
But the real problem with the LGPL is this:
It has always been the FSF's position that dynamically linking applications to libraries creates a single work derived from both the library code and the application code.
The problem with this position, if held up, it would effectively make 3rd party applications illegal on commercial OSes like Windows/Mac/Unix.
For example, Emacs for Windows dynamaically links to Windows DLLs. Therefore, according to the FSF, WinEmacs is a derived work of MS Windows, and therefore can not be distributed without Microsoft's permission. Well obviously that isn't the legal reality.
The LGPL is deeply based on this unusual interpretation of software copyright law. Which wouldn't be a big deal if was a "EULA", but it's unclear if it is or not.
Making it difficult to connect applications together because one is not under the GPL and doesn't want to be.
The GPL doesn't make this difficult, it is the ambiguous definition of derived software works under copyright law. Until some court lays down some strict rules, this is a problem for everyone integrating different pieces of software.
Admittedly, RMS/FSF hasn't helped the situation by postulating a bunch of made-up informal rules based on "linking" when the legal reality is probably much more subtle (for example, the Linux Nvidia driver).
The issue is that it intentionally eliminates GPL for certain types of software.
For example, you can't write a GPL MP3 encoder and say "Please obtain the appropriate patent licence from MP3 Inc.". Instead the GPL itself makes it illegal to distribute it anywhere where the MP3 patents are enforced. (but people do it anyway)
I think the OP's fear is that you could get stuck with retroactively illegal GPL software even if you are willing to licence the patents.
I think the main issue is that Gnome and Mozilla moved to simplier interface with no easy way to get back to the old UI. At least with the new MS interfaces a little twiddling can get them back to 1995-style.
> Joe Schmoe also uses MS Word, ... There is absolutely no hint that anybody gets turned off by features in the configuration
Compare the default UIs of Word 6.0 with Word 2003. Same functionality, but the latter is much simplier -- less toolbars, hidden menu items, taskbars instead of dialogs, etc.
I don't want to argue about "better", just that Joe Shmoe obviously believes that stripped down UIs are more accessible and therefore more popular than ones heavy with little used "nerd options". Obviously the Firefox devs are thinking this way.
The Netscape versions of the Mozilla appsuite did recieve tons of marketing hype (at that point Mozilla was a division of AOL). I wouldn't kid myself, the people pushing this don't really care about security, except for as a comparison issue with Internet Explorer.
> But it sure sold a shitload of computers
No it didn't. (The following 'lemmings' ad was even worse.)
People respected the original Mac technically, but the computers sold poorly until they developed expandable models a few years later.
Well, it was post-1.0 for Mozilla Appsuite.
Well obviously newspaper advertisng has some place, or IBM and Microsoft wouldn't be doing it. The thing is that the big guys are following up the mass media bombardment with targetted direct mailings (that have more info), and then following up those with sales calls.
... somewhere". But due to the lack of coordination this seems iffy.
I guess the assumption is that the IT department is going to be making an internal pitch for Firefox, and the CIO would say "Oh, I've heard of that
It seems to me that the money would have been better spent on web banner ads, because at least people could 'convert' right their on the spot. It's not like people read newspapers in front of their computer.
Actually, a lot of the security in Firefox was patched on after the fact.
For example, older releases of FF/Mozilla had a ActiveX-type system that could popup an "Install Me" box when you visited a web page. When spyware makers started to abuse this, Mozilla simply changed the policy so it was impossible.
But, the only reason they could get away with this is that the feature had so few legitimate users outside of 1 or 2 known websites. If Microsoft did something similar, they would break thousands of legitimate applicaitons (this is where the popularity/installedbase argument comes into play).
Don't get me wrong -- FF did the right thing reacting quickly to Spyware installers, but it was still an after-the-fact reaction to a poorly designed feature.
The old argument about Mozilla was not that it was "Secure by Design", but that it was "A Great Developer Platform". Developer Platform means extendibility means opportunity for hacks/spyware. There's always going to be interesting new applications of the extentions/XUL stuff that Mozilla will have to keep an eye on.
> Yes, it certainly doesn't do a very good job of propagating ignorance does it?
Typical kneejerk smarter-than-thou nerd response. If people don't read the ad, it doesn't do a very good job of NOT propagating ignorance. This is marketing after all, not a man page.
People do know what a "web browser" is, but it isn't the immediate emotional conneciton they have to the Internet. ie, they think "I'm going to surf the web", not "I shall open my web browser program."
Not to mention that there's strong evidence that people are NOT fed up with Internet Explorer, or it wouldn't have had such a dominating marketshare over the last 5 years. The people fed up with IE have already switched to something else, the ad seems to be preaching to the converted.
"Are you looking for a better way to surf the web?" would've been more accessible and would actually give the typical IE user a reason to look at Firefox.
Daveschroeder mainly shows up here in times of GeekRage with some canned karmawhore post about how Apple Can Never Be Wrong.
He's most likely an Apple Employee astroturfing. Either that or a sad no-life apologist troll, but he's been a very successful at getting bites today.
Yeah turfboy, you got a stalker.
> Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender
Yet, Windows NT 4.0 basically killed the UNIX Workstation market dead. It might not have been as solid as UNIX (which was more debatable in the mid-90s), but it certainly was playing in the same ballpark unlike DOS or OS/2. By the time Win2000 came out, the Unix world had long given up on Workstations except for token efforts from Sun.
No suprise, because the Unix world's reaction to Windows NT was to roll-over. When NT came out in 1993, they reacted by killing development of Mofif/CDE and X11. Which is the big reason Linux has a tough time on the "desktop" -- they were handed a bunch of 10 year old technology that wasn't necessarily the best design in the first place.
Sorry for the late reply, but I was rereading and I noticed something:
Now - is that idemnification needed? I personally find it questionable. But then, I question a certain amount of the perceieved need for "support" too.
Every computer system needs some level of "support", no questions. The issue is that local expert/Google/IRC/Forum support often makes vendor phone support unnecessary, especially for simple/common configurations.
On the other hand, Linux might go for 20 years without a patent problem appearing. In fact if OSRM was certain there was a particular patent problem with Linux, they probably wouldn't be offering the service in the first place.
So I don't see the pitches as being all that similar. As Rumsfeld said, there's things you known you don't know (support) and then there's things you don't know you don't know (patents).
> they parse as XML, applying all of XML's constraints
And this benefits the guy reading ESPN.com how?
> no spec anywhere says that browsers have to support [progressive rendering]
Also, no spec says it shouldn't take 60 seconds for your home page to load or that you shouldn't start a popup storm on the user's system. Your preference for hidden protocol details over an optimal user experience makes you seem a bit quacky here. You might want to rethink your position.
> Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has a validating XML parser to draw on (MSXML), but for some reason won't put it to use
Yes, IE sucks. However, you seem to be suggesting that it suck more by misadvertising it's features.
> In fact, you lose the eXtensibility of XHTML when you don't serve it as XML
Not at all. Your client applicaiton can still treat the page as XML no matter what the MIME type is. The type is a useful hint, that's all.
> use XSLT at the last step to transform to HTML 4.01 Strict
Is there some part of XHTML that is invalid HTML? This seems unnecessary. Not that neccessity would enter into your thinking.
Best practice here is to use some form of content negotiation to send application/xhtml+xml to user-agents which support it.
This MIME type defeats progressive rendering in Mozilla, which makes the page appear much more slowly. Good reason not to use it on a commercial site -- HTML is just much better supported than XHTML even among the few browsers that care about XHTML at all.
No version of Internet Explorer ever released on any platform anywhere is capable of dealing with that MIME-type.
You miss the forest from the trees. IE doesn't support XHTML, So, IE is actually correctly not accepting a MIME type that it can't support. The fact that other browsers lie about their XHTML support makes it easier for developers, but it is not necessarily "correct".
Ultimately it's just a MIME type, nothing more. The abstract benefits of XHTML* are all still just as valid even if for practical reasons it's served with the wrong type.
* The real value with XHTML is content managment systems and parsing scripts. Graphical Web Browsers do such a damn good job with HTML parsing that there's very little payback delivering 100% XHTML to eyeballs.
The whining is the only reason that Mac has a somewhat decent game library. Mac users are loud, but they back it up with $$$. And there's certain things (Half-Life port being cancelled right before release) that deserve to be whined about.
Compare this to Linux users -- Oh Quake III for Linux was delayed two weeks so I had to buy the Windows version, the bastards.
Don't bother fighting. Slashdot will never stop being on the insightful vanguard of 1993 technology.
AFAICT, the 'window' object is defacto (Netscape) standard and was never standardized by the W3C.
Traditionally, windows weren't private to sites, but this is just a variation of the "cross-frame scripting" bugs that have been patched over time.
> that's what threaded mailers are for
/. is the home of lost technological causes, so I'm behind you here.
Unfortunately, the threading support in Outlook and Notes is pretty bad. Not to mention that I've got better things to fight about than how my boss uses has his Inbox configured.
Generally, I trim off the irrelvant information on the bottom of the reply chain. However, recently I was emailing this CYA-Asshole who would actually paste the entire reply history back in to the email, including the parts that made him look like an idiot.
Crusading for Usenet netiquette in corporate mail is a lost cause, but