The issue is linking. Is your program linked (in the compilation sense of the word) with the DNS server? If you contact the DNS server over a network, your program is not linked with it, even if the DNS server code is GPLed. If you've incorporated GPLed code into your program, then your program becomes GPLed (this is a gross simplification of course).
Congratulations on a nice project. Could you answer the question which is entitled, '"Free" but apparently not Free'? I'm sure many readers here would be interested in the answer.
Nokia makes development kits for their phones. One of them runs on linux. I think you can't generalize, but I do know to my cost that although Siemens claims that their development kit is freely downloadable, it was too difficult for me to figure out how to do it. I stupidly bought a cheap Siemens phone with the intention of trying out development on it, but couldn't fight my way through their registration process - even though I've tried using Windows! I've learned my lesson. My next phone will be a Nokia.
I wrote some code this morning and I didn't put any restrictions on it, so you can't say that anymore.
To create restriction-free software, you have to do something. Unless you specifically noted that you were relinquishing copyright to your code, there are restrictions on what (eg) I can do with it, by virtue of the fact that you wrote it.
Not true. What if it was released as public domain? YOU said if there was no GPL on the code. That means anything non-GPL.
You're right. I should have said "if there is no licence on the code.
Not true. What if it was released as public domain? YOU said if there was no GPL on the code. That means anything non-GPL.
Here you sound like Bart Simpson.
Wrong again. You are ASSuming that those restrictions are in place by default. They are not.
You are simply incorrect. Without a licence on the code, normal copyright applies as default.
Your arguments in this post are simply childish. If the world was full of public domain software, what you said would make some sense. Since it is not full of public domain software, and since all software carries some restrictions at the point when it is written, and since the default restrictions are more restrictive than the GPL, it makes sense on the planet where I live to state the the GPL removes restrictions.
If there was no GPL on the code, you would be able to do less with the code than the GPL allows you to do. Applying the GPL to a work removes restrictions. For example, without the GPL, you would have zero rights to copy it.
There are many "computer crushing" techniques people can use to completely dominate most computers. I believe it is Tal that has prowess at this, mostly because of his fairly "different" style of play.
Tal's different style of play might be due the fact that he has been dead for years.
Commercial chess programmers (there are about a dozen that I know about) don't say too much about how their programs work. (Deep) Junior is claimed to be a rather speculative program. I think since 1995 either Junior or the German program Shredder has won every world championship for computer chess (some of these were "micro" events).
I met Amir and Shay at the World Computer Chess Championships in Maastricht 2002. They both give a slight impression of not being approachable, but they are generally friendly to talk to. At the Award Ceremony at the end, they both made incredibly gracious speeches. A class act all round, in my opinion.
I think you're incorrect here, but I believe it's because you're being imprecise. I think that you own the copy that you get (which isn't true of a typical EULA), but I don't think you can sensibly talk about "owning" the code, without the concept of copyright. Otherwise everyone who has ever downloaded/bought Free Software would "own" that SW, which doesn't make much sense for any reasonable definition of "own".
I don't agree, actually. This is a company that wants to sell things for money. If I was buying something from a company, I would assume that they had checked that what they were doing was legal. I'd be pretty surprised if I bought a PC and the supplier said, "Windows is installed, but we downloaded a warez copy of Office".
There is nothing this company can say that makes it OK to breach the terms of the GPL. The article states that they were informed about the breach and they simply took steps to make it harder to spot. Even if they did not know that what they did was wrong (which seems unlikely), it would still be OK to blame them. Surely it's not too much to ask that they read the licences of the code they are planning to use?
The SW isn't "in your possession" in a typical commercial EULA. What you get is a "licence" to use the software, under certain conditions. You don't own the SW after you buy it.
In a sense, the GPL is the same, as you don't "own" the SW either (the copyright remains with the author(s)); the difference is what you're allowed to do with it. A commercial EULA usually adds a lot of restrictions to standard copyright arrangements. The GPL takes away restrictions; the simplest thing it does is to allow you to copy the SW without restriction. It also guarantees you access to the sourcecode if you've only got the binary. In exchange for these extra rights, you agree to some duties, namely to distribute the source code to whoever you distribute the binary to.
Anyone who has written GPLed code that has been copied could sue. Since it's GPLed code, the FSF will probably handle it in the first instance. What happens normally is that the FSF approaches the company, explains that no-one has ever tried to defend this form of copyright theft in court and then dares the company in question to be the first. Then the company sees the error of its ways and desists.
I agree to an extent about the installation thing, but this issue points up an interesting difference between the work desktop and the home desktop.
I suspect that most businesses who are interested in Linux on the desktop see the fact that it can be complicated to install new applications (and more importantly the sysadmins can prevent installations) as a major benefit of installing Linux. Most businesses dream of simplifying their IT provision, and I would guess that it is a major source of work for Windows admins to repair PCs which have had outside SW installed on them. As a related issue, I hope this consortium considers the question of making it simple to change the user's wallpaper, while providing tools for the Admins to prevent the installation of SW.
The home desktop is a different issue. I suspect that most home users of Linux are people like us, who are geeks and like to experiment. So for us, the software installation question is important. On the other hand, I bet there are a fair few people like us who have become tired of parents/grandparents/siblings etc whose Windows PCs are no longer working who just install Linux because we know that Grandma or whoever knows nothing about computers and just uses the thing to write letters and emails. People like Grandma, who, in my opinion are going to prove a major market for Linux systems, need something like a business desktop. People like us geeks want SW installation to be Windows-smooth on Linux, but we're going to be in the minority, I believe.
The problem with the film was the sentimental crap in the first 15 minutes. All that: "It is my greatest honour to conduct this ceremony..". "Oh look, we're getting married..", "Oh! I don't want to be in the nude in the ceremony on Mars..", "Will, you're the best damn First Officer I've ever had.." blah blah fucking blah was just painful!
When Worf finally looked at his monitor thing and said "Captain we're getting some unexplained yada yada from that planet over there", I turned to my friend and said "thank God for that".
First of all, OSS can't "die" as you put it. The vast majority of OS/free software is developed because people want to develop it. OS developers are not competing with windows; they're just developing SW because they want to. The majority of them don't care about getting money for their SW.
What you're referring to is companies like SuSE and RedHat, which sell Linux distributions. These might be more vulnerable, but I believe that this step is "too little, too late". Many people simply don't trust MS. Windows' abominable record on security really doesn't sit well with responsible administration of PCs, even on the desktop. Non-geeks seem to "get" this in a way that even 12 months ago they did not.
There's also the fact that Windows isn't the only cost. I bought my copy of WinXP for £120 (~$200) in the UK. For that I got Windows XP and not much else. My copy of SuSE 8.1 cost me £60, for which I got the OS on DVD. The rest of the DVD is occupied by thousands of SW packages. Even if Windows had cost £60, the SUSE would still be an outrageous bargain in comparison. The point is that it would cost a LOT to replicate that other SW under Windows. Even if I just use the Office-alike packages, I'd still need to pay £250 for the real thing. I do a lot of development work, so I'd also have to shell out for Visual Studio, or whatever it's called as well. The cost quickly mounts up.
Obviously I'm just an individual, and £400 or whatever it would be doesn't really matter either way. But if I'm buying 100 PCs for an office somewhere and I need to pay even £150 for each copy of Office, that's still FIFTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS. That's a lot of money for software which still seems to crash rather a lot, and which seems to act as a magnet for viruses and worms.
This is complete nonsense. No such incident occurred. Kasparov claimed that there was interference, but he was simply reacting emotionally to his poor play.
For an excellent description of the design of Deep Blue and the matches against Kasparov, see this book
I don't think that's true, actually. You're thinking of the FTSE100 (used to be FTSE30), which is a measure of how well the stockmarket is doing on a given day. It's calculated from the prices of the stocks of 100 listed companies. The Stock Exchange itself isn't owned by the FT.
Seaways are supposed to be safer then these things.
I don't understand how the Segway, which weighs 69lbs can be safer than a skateboard, or rollerblades. I think that taking the laissez-faire attitude you propose might be difficult in a litigious culture. What if someone really gets hurt by a careless Segway user? Who pays? The temptation might be to sue the richest entity involved, namely the city which is responsible for the sidewalk. This way, the city can say that they did what they could to prevent the problem.
Aaargh! Sorry sorry sorry. I thought you were responding to my earlier post. I will in future take the trouble to read the post you are responding to, and try to match the level of debate on Slashdot. My apologies again.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is linking. Is your program linked (in the compilation sense of the word) with the DNS server? If you contact the DNS server over a network, your program is not linked with it, even if the DNS server code is GPLed. If you've incorporated GPLed code into your program, then your program becomes GPLed (this is a gross simplification of course).
Congratulations on a nice project. Could you answer the question which is entitled, '"Free" but apparently not Free'? I'm sure many readers here would be interested in the answer.
Nokia makes development kits for their phones. One of them runs on linux. I think you can't generalize, but I do know to my cost that although Siemens claims that their development kit is freely downloadable, it was too difficult for me to figure out how to do it. I stupidly bought a cheap Siemens phone with the intention of trying out development on it, but couldn't fight my way through their registration process - even though I've tried using Windows! I've learned my lesson. My next phone will be a Nokia.
I understand. Sorry about the intemperate tone of my previous post.
To create restriction-free software, you have to do something. Unless you specifically noted that you were relinquishing copyright to your code, there are restrictions on what (eg) I can do with it, by virtue of the fact that you wrote it.
You're right. I should have said "if there is no licence on the code.
Here you sound like Bart Simpson.
You are simply incorrect. Without a licence on the code, normal copyright applies as default.
Your arguments in this post are simply childish. If the world was full of public domain software, what you said would make some sense. Since it is not full of public domain software, and since all software carries some restrictions at the point when it is written, and since the default restrictions are more restrictive than the GPL, it makes sense on the planet where I live to state the the GPL removes restrictions.
You do not understand what you are saying.
If there was no GPL on the code, you would be able to do less with the code than the GPL allows you to do. Applying the GPL to a work removes restrictions. For example, without the GPL, you would have zero rights to copy it.
Tal's different style of play might be due the fact that he has been dead for years.
Commercial chess programmers (there are about a dozen that I know about) don't say too much about how their programs work. (Deep) Junior is claimed to be a rather speculative program. I think since 1995 either Junior or the German program Shredder has won every world championship for computer chess (some of these were "micro" events).
I met Amir and Shay at the World Computer Chess Championships in Maastricht 2002. They both give a slight impression of not being approachable, but they are generally friendly to talk to. At the Award Ceremony at the end, they both made incredibly gracious speeches. A class act all round, in my opinion.
I think you're incorrect here, but I believe it's because you're being imprecise. I think that you own the copy that you get (which isn't true of a typical EULA), but I don't think you can sensibly talk about "owning" the code, without the concept of copyright. Otherwise everyone who has ever downloaded/bought Free Software would "own" that SW, which doesn't make much sense for any reasonable definition of "own".
I don't agree, actually. This is a company that wants to sell things for money. If I was buying something from a company, I would assume that they had checked that what they were doing was legal. I'd be pretty surprised if I bought a PC and the supplier said, "Windows is installed, but we downloaded a warez copy of Office".
There is nothing this company can say that makes it OK to breach the terms of the GPL. The article states that they were informed about the breach and they simply took steps to make it harder to spot. Even if they did not know that what they did was wrong (which seems unlikely), it would still be OK to blame them. Surely it's not too much to ask that they read the licences of the code they are planning to use?
The SW isn't "in your possession" in a typical commercial EULA. What you get is a "licence" to use the software, under certain conditions. You don't own the SW after you buy it.
In a sense, the GPL is the same, as you don't "own" the SW either (the copyright remains with the author(s)); the difference is what you're allowed to do with it. A commercial EULA usually adds a lot of restrictions to standard copyright arrangements. The GPL takes away restrictions; the simplest thing it does is to allow you to copy the SW without restriction. It also guarantees you access to the sourcecode if you've only got the binary. In exchange for these extra rights, you agree to some duties, namely to distribute the source code to whoever you distribute the binary to.
Anyone who has written GPLed code that has been copied could sue. Since it's GPLed code, the FSF will probably handle it in the first instance. What happens normally is that the FSF approaches the company, explains that no-one has ever tried to defend this form of copyright theft in court and then dares the company in question to be the first. Then the company sees the error of its ways and desists.
I agree to an extent about the installation thing, but this issue points up an interesting difference between the work desktop and the home desktop.
I suspect that most businesses who are interested in Linux on the desktop see the fact that it can be complicated to install new applications (and more importantly the sysadmins can prevent installations) as a major benefit of installing Linux. Most businesses dream of simplifying their IT provision, and I would guess that it is a major source of work for Windows admins to repair PCs which have had outside SW installed on them. As a related issue, I hope this consortium considers the question of making it simple to change the user's wallpaper, while providing tools for the Admins to prevent the installation of SW.
The home desktop is a different issue. I suspect that most home users of Linux are people like us, who are geeks and like to experiment. So for us, the software installation question is important. On the other hand, I bet there are a fair few people like us who have become tired of parents/grandparents/siblings etc whose Windows PCs are no longer working who just install Linux because we know that Grandma or whoever knows nothing about computers and just uses the thing to write letters and emails. People like Grandma, who, in my opinion are going to prove a major market for Linux systems, need something like a business desktop. People like us geeks want SW installation to be Windows-smooth on Linux, but we're going to be in the minority, I believe.
The problem with the film was the sentimental crap in the first 15 minutes. All that: "It is my greatest honour to conduct this ceremony..". "Oh look, we're getting married..", "Oh! I don't want to be in the nude in the ceremony on Mars..", "Will, you're the best damn First Officer I've ever had.." blah blah fucking blah was just painful!
When Worf finally looked at his monitor thing and said "Captain we're getting some unexplained yada yada from that planet over there", I turned to my friend and said "thank God for that".
First of all, OSS can't "die" as you put it. The vast majority of OS/free software is developed because people want to develop it. OS developers are not competing with windows; they're just developing SW because they want to. The majority of them don't care about getting money for their SW.
What you're referring to is companies like SuSE and RedHat, which sell Linux distributions. These might be more vulnerable, but I believe that this step is "too little, too late". Many people simply don't trust MS. Windows' abominable record on security really doesn't sit well with responsible administration of PCs, even on the desktop. Non-geeks seem to "get" this in a way that even 12 months ago they did not.
There's also the fact that Windows isn't the only cost. I bought my copy of WinXP for £120 (~$200) in the UK. For that I got Windows XP and not much else. My copy of SuSE 8.1 cost me £60, for which I got the OS on DVD. The rest of the DVD is occupied by thousands of SW packages. Even if Windows had cost £60, the SUSE would still be an outrageous bargain in comparison. The point is that it would cost a LOT to replicate that other SW under Windows. Even if I just use the Office-alike packages, I'd still need to pay £250 for the real thing. I do a lot of development work, so I'd also have to shell out for Visual Studio, or whatever it's called as well. The cost quickly mounts up.
Obviously I'm just an individual, and £400 or whatever it would be doesn't really matter either way. But if I'm buying 100 PCs for an office somewhere and I need to pay even £150 for each copy of Office, that's still FIFTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS. That's a lot of money for software which still seems to crash rather a lot, and which seems to act as a magnet for viruses and worms.
Yeah. I knew that, apart from the name of they guy. I was trying to take Soviet Russia jokes to strange new places. Not very successfully, I'm afraid.
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft makes a profit on every Xbox they sell!
This is complete nonsense. No such incident occurred. Kasparov claimed that there was interference, but he was simply reacting emotionally to his poor play.
For an excellent description of the design of Deep Blue and the matches against Kasparov, see this book
I read this as one typeface, namely Vera. There are ten fonts available in that typeface. Think Vera Italic, Vera Bold, etc.
I think that's what they mean. Further down someone has posted a link to a page with the fonts on. They are gorgeous, IMO.
I don't think that's true, actually. You're thinking of the FTSE100 (used to be FTSE30), which is a measure of how well the stockmarket is doing on a given day. It's calculated from the prices of the stocks of 100 listed companies. The Stock Exchange itself isn't owned by the FT.
It doesn't "take away" this freedom, as you don't have it anyway.
I don't understand how the Segway, which weighs 69lbs can be safer than a skateboard, or rollerblades. I think that taking the laissez-faire attitude you propose might be difficult in a litigious culture. What if someone really gets hurt by a careless Segway user? Who pays? The temptation might be to sue the richest entity involved, namely the city which is responsible for the sidewalk. This way, the city can say that they did what they could to prevent the problem.
2/6 - Viewing the source
3/6 - Modifying and distributing
1/6 - Profit!
Aaargh! Sorry sorry sorry. I thought you were responding to my earlier post. I will in future take the trouble to read the post you are responding to, and try to match the level of debate on Slashdot. My apologies again.