*sigh* Take off the tinfoil hat, for Pete's sake. Your brain is beginning to cook.
I heard that bin Laden is on the board of some or many defense contractors. He supposedly has NOT been removed.
That would have been MOHAMED bin Laden. He's the former head of the Bin Laden Group, an international construction conglomerate that has large corporate interests in many different industries. He is no longer on the board of any company, since he has passed away.
Mohamed was Osama's father, but there was no great love between them. Mohamed disowned his son decades ago and helped pressure the Saudi royals to yank his Saudi citizenship. The etire family has turned its back on their most famous member because he's a serious embarassment to them and very, very bad for their business. Mind you, the bin Laden family is quite rich and very happy with the status quo in Saudi Arabia. The absolute last thing Mohamed's family wants is the idiology that Osama promotes.
I can program a cube spinning on its axis that lasts for 1800 frames (1 minute at 30fps) in about 3 minutes. Want something more complex? It'll take more time.
A free graphical front end for POV-Ray is Moray [stmuc.comx].
Well, to be clear, Moray is not free. Its nagware. A fully registered license costs 80 Euros. However, the unregistered version is not crippled. It does nag a lot though.
But catch her in a dishonesty before you slam her.
Why? She doesn't offer that to writers at BusinessWeek who disagree with her.
But catch her in dishonesty I have:
ITEM ONE: She put words in the mouth of a columnist at LinuxInsider (Phil Albert) claiming he said something he never said then strawmanned him to death. The original article was "lost" on Groklaw, but you can read his response to PJ accusing her of putting words in his mouth here.
To quote PJ (from memory, since the original is gone): Basically, he [Albert] basically told businesses not to use the GPL.
Albert's response: My column on the GPL 2.0 was a product review, not an attack on the GPL itself -- and anyway, it was mostly favorable. I never said that companies should not use it, and I am not opposed to the concept of copyleft.
I read Albert's original article. He's right. By my reading, he never even implied it. PJ made that up out of whole cloth.
ITEM TWO: She did a character assassination on Gosling because they don't see eye-to-eye on Java and the GPL -- and because Sun isn't doing what PJ and RMS wants them to do with their own software (release the Sun JDK under the GPL). However in the BusinessWeek rant, she says the authors should license however they want. Nice double standard. To quote PJ: You have to admit, there is something comical in a commentary asking the authors to change their license. Yes, there is PJ. Yes, there is. Leave Gosling alone for not wanting to release the Sun JDK under your favorite license.
ITEM THREE: Here's another double standard form PJ. From today no less:
Journalists are a cynical bunch. They've seen it all, heard execs and politicians spin baloney, and endured endless press conferences where they've been told what turn out to be lies, so they can be forgiven for ending up Being From Missouri. The thing about journalists is, they do usually know what is really happening. They may not print what they know, or all they know, or they may feel compelled to slant it to suit their editors/owners. But they know.
Wow! Journalists suddenly "know"! Despite 18 months of PJ's rants that journalists will report whatever FUD is put in front of them. I could quote them, but why bother. You've read them for months.
In this case, PJ is right. Journalists "may feel compelled to slant it to suit their editors/owners". PJ should know. According to the top of the Groklaw site, she's now a "journalist". - - - - - - You know, I'm not doing anything with this post that PJ doesn't do every day with Groklaw. I'm using PJ's own contradictory words against her. The difference is, I admit that I'm biased against PJ and I'm slanted against her rants. I also don't call myself a "journalist", which implies that I'm being objective. I'm not. I admit that. That is what separates me from her.
For the record, the output of a "journalist" is not a "blog".
Oh, BS. Groklaw USED to be a blog. Maybe 18 months ago. However, back then it wasn't hosted by ibiblio. Back then, it didn't have its own membership database. Back then, PJ didn't refer to Groklaw as a "community movement". Back then, PJ was a nobody and she stuck to the facts. Now she uses Groklaw as her bully pulpit. Its no blog.
Groklaw "has zero credibility"? Zero? All those legal papers quoted and analyzed, and that leads to zero credibililty, just because your opinion on life differs from that of PJ? That doesn't pass the smell test.
Zero. Just as much as I don't trust research funded by Microsoft nor I trust research from anyone, no matter how well-quoted, who leans so hard toward one agenda. When PJ attacks anyone who doesn't praise the GPL, even others in the open source community, how can I know she's not putting the thumb on the scales? Its very, very easy to ignore research that goes against her point of view and over-hype the research that does. I don't trust PJ not to do that.
Besides, PJ now has financial stake in this. Her employment with OSRM (which was quoted in the article she slammed, interestingly enough) has put her in a strange conflict-of-interests. How can I know she's not a mouthpiece for OSRM?
Businesses would have a very hard time if all FOSS code disappeared.
Really? That just makes no sense to me. Business seemed to exist and operate just fine before FOSS. Most businesses exist just fine today without FOSS. Most businesses are small businesses and most small businesses use Windows. That's a fact. No large businesses rely solely on open source and all have closed source alternatives (UNIX, etc.) If all the open source software suddenly disappeared, I tend to doubt our businesses would collapse. That's the silliest arguement I've ever heard.
That didn't sound much like a "demonstration on the need for more research". That read like a stream-of-consciousness religious rant to me.
Trust me. We have eyes. We see. We will be the wiser. And you will eventually go out of business if you follow that path or you won't be a Linux company any more. Here's why: the FOSS community isn't dependent on business at all. It's the other way around. And if you are foolish and short-sighted enough to think you don't need community support, try it.
Whee-ha! Time for Prozac, PJ.
In all seriousness though, when it comes to things that are not directly related to a lawsuit, Groklaw has about as much research in it as a grade-school term paper: Just enough to get by without it smelling too highly of bullshit. Groklaw has zero credibility anymore, at least with me. Its a zealot site. Nothing more.
Besides, PJ is just plain wrong. The FOSS community relies just as much on business as business relies on it. Companies have invested billions in FOSS and, most importantly, have given it "street cred". If IBM is willing to invest over $1,000,000,000 (that's a LOT of 0's) in Linux, it MUST be worth something. Bottom line is that if it wasn't for some very large companies such as IBM with very deep pockets, Linux and open source software would be absolutely nowhere near as advanced, as recognized, or as accepted as it is today. Sorry to burst your bubble, PJ.
SWT, the last time I checked, uses GTK widgets on Linux
Actually, it has both GTK and Motif bindings on Linux.
I have no idea if they are gonna write one for Qt.
Very, very unlikely. Qt's dual licensing nicely prevents that.
SWT was written for use in Eclipse. Eclipse is open source and distributed free. But! Eclipse is also sold as part of closed source software such as WebSphere Studio App Developer.
If SWT had Qt bindings, commercial products developed from the Eclipse codebase would require the purchase of a Qt license from TrollSoft. That would seriously encumber of the value and the purpose of the Eclipse project.
I completely agree with you on your post. Especially this:
If the owner of the site actually WAS Fallwell (regardless of the content), or was a business with that name but in an unrelated industry (first come first serve in cases of conflict I'd say)
However, not always the case. One should only look as far as www.nissan.com.
Uzi Nissan has run self-named businesses in the United States for decades. When Mr. Nissan started Nissan International, Nissan Motors was known in the US as "Datsun". From the success of Nissan International, he created Nissan Computers. In 1994, he registered the domain name "www.nissan.com".
You can probably guess what happened. SIX years later, Nissan Motors sued Mr. Nissan for $10 million. But, the Nissan is the guy's name and the name of his business. He used the name in the US longer than Nissan Motors did. He is in a completely unrelated industry. He registered a trademark with the Nissan name a decade ago, years before the lawsuit. Slam dunk for Mr. Nissan, right?
Wrong.
While Nissan Motors didn't get their $10 million and lost most of their claims, there's no question that Nissan Motors won the case in every sense of the word. You can read more about it here
Having stood along with the crowds along the Champs-Elysee on the last day of the Tour, I don't know if I'd call it "riveting".
The last day is mostly for the cameras and the crowds. The winner is already known and has practically no chance of losing at that point. The leaders don't even bother trying to win the stage and come in waaaaay in the back of pack, often over 20 seconds behind the stage leader. 20 seconds doesn't seem like a lot, but that actually puts them at the back of the pack. Lance is known to drink champaigne and chat with reporters while "racing" on his last day.
This year, Lance came in 114th.
The last day of the Tour is a lot of fun with the crowds, the booths, the parades (lots of parades) and the music, but its not "riveting". However, I did get lots of great photos and movies as they passed me over 20 times!
Quite a leap to make just by reading the sentence differently.
Not at all. Let me help you with the alternate parsing:
load it up with (windows or something) (free [of charge])
Although, I would grant that if that was the intent, it would be more lucid to place a comma after "something". However, grammatically, it is valid. With this parsing, it is no different (grammatically) than saying:
load it up with windows or linux free.
I don't think that was the intent of the sentence, but it is understandable how it could have been confusing.
What moron modded this guy up? He obviously didn't read the article.
This guy didn't invent anything. He didn't work for research and development (he was a business-guy). He didn't get fired over DRM or anything close. He was fired over a compensation dispute.
COBOL programmers a a dying breed... but it scares me that its still out there... lurking
I know you meant to be funny. However, there are a LOT of COBOL programmers out there. While there definately were a lot more in the past, and there was a lot of them that came out of the woodwork for the Y2K thingie, COBOL programmers are long from extinct.
Most COBOL programs that existed for the Y2K thing still exist 4 years later. They were patched for the date conversion, but not replaced. In fact, I've got a COBOL programmer on my staff who is writing NEW COBOL programs (interface modules between the old CICS stuff and new Java-based stuff on a 390).
take it you haven't actually read the license? I also got a copy of the Java RPM from Red Hat. I presume that Red Hat has/had some special deal with Sun. But if you really read the license you'll find that you aren't permitted to redistribute it.
Okay... this is all mixed up. The RPM I referred to was IBM's, not Sun's -- so any RedHat deal with Sun has nothing to do with any of this. So have I read Sun's license? No, because I use IBM's SDK. Do they have a redistribution restriction? No. They even released the compiler part of the SDK as open source (its called Jikes).
Furthermore, no one needs to redistribute the SDK. The most anyone would ever need to redistribute (and only in rare cases) would be the JRE. Later in your post you mention blackdown. I found on blackdown.org, in less than 10 seconds, that you are allowed to redistribute the JRE -- even in commercial applications.
IBM's sdk differs in several ways from Sun's sdk. I said "If your project depends on Sun's sdk". There are several projects that have slightly differing sdk's and many programs are dependant on the particular one choosen.
Bull. The whole point of Java is interoperability. In order to be "Java" it has to adhere 100% to the published Java specification. IBM's SDK does this. Anything written using IBM's SDK will work just fine with the corresponding JVM written by Sun. While there are differences, those have to do with the internal implementation of the specification. IBM's version of the stack, for example, is about 20% faster than Sun's in Java 1.3. However, they behave identically.
(E.g., gcj can't run programs dependant on several pieces of Sun's sdk, because there is no equivalent functionality. Because Sun's sdk ISN'T open source, but is released in a manner that prohibits this. That's one of the reasons for gnu/classpath.)
Sun's SDK is not open source. That is correct. But the specification of their SDK is widely published. The only reason why GCJ doesn't have "equivalent functionality" is because GCJ either didn't implement it by choice or they they haven't figured out how to compile it in a manner that doesn't rely on a VM. It has nothing to do with anything Sun did.
Sun forced them to be that restrictive, even though they developed the compiler essentially independently. (I.e., not independently enough.)
Laugh!! No they didn't!! They took Sun's JDK source code and ported it under license! It's not a cleanroom implementation by any means! They say so very plainly all over their website.
Sun's license forbids any one besides them to distribute the Java sdk.
This isn't true at all. I do my Java development using IBM's Java SDK (which is available for Linux as an RPM). There are several Java SDKs available that are produced by people who aren't Sun. I saw on another thread here a link to a webpage that lists some of them.
Sun's license also doesn't obligate them to support the Java sdk.
This is true, but kinda irrelevant. The same thing is true with every open source license. There's nothing obligating anyone from supporting, say, gcc. Given that Sun isn't the only people producing SDKs (see point 1), then if Sun stopped supporting Java, then IBM or someone else would.
Therefore your project is not totally free if it depends on Sun's code.
As I said earlier, my code doesn't depend one bit on Sun code. I personally don't use any Sun code at all in my Java development. However, I do use Sun Java specifications (which IBM's SDK adheres to).
However, many open source projects (including Linux) adhere to closed standards, be it from W3C or IEEE or Sun.
Now I'll grand that discontinuation is a bit extreme, but massive code changes have happened already, and products that depended on the prior versions have gone off the market, so this isn't a hypothetical example.
I don't understand this argument. Yes, Java has evolved over the last decade. But so has a lot of other things, including open source things. Is your argument that backwards-compatitibility is required for "truly" free software? There's nothing preventing anyone from including an old JVM (and every version of the JVM is available) with their software -- or porting their software to the latest specifications. I don't think that "it must always be able to work on the latest and greatest version of the language to be truely free" is a valid argument.
The only conclusion you can draw from this is that the software is therefore not truly free, and that presumably RMS wants truly free software.
No, the only conclusion I can make is that just because RMS says its so, it doesn't necessarily make it so.
My whole point, and my only point, was a rejection of your (still) unsubstaniated presumption that the tons and tons of free/open source software written in the Java language is not "truly" free.
The only logical fallicy, I'm afraid, is yours when you say, essentially: "Java software is not truly free because Java software is not truly free." That simply doesn't fly with me. The conclusions don't hold if the given claim is unsubstantiated and questionable.
To be truly free [speech] software, your language cannot be under a corporate thumb like that.
You say that as if its a universal axiom, yet its strangely unsupported in any way.
However, there is a LOT of open source Java software (the excellent work going on at Apache Jakarta being just one of many fine examples). There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that Java programmers can't play in the open source arena along with anyone else.
I find it very disturbing that RMS (and you) would attempt to verbally exclude all the open source software that thousands of developers are giving to the world every day simply to take a cheap political stab at Sun. I would like to think that F/OSS is INCLUSIONARY not exclusionary. However, I'm starting to think that RMS's position is becoming more and more that the only "true" open source software is that which is compiled using GNU tools. Everyone else can go rot.
Not to mention, taking RMS's stupid logic to the extreme, there's no open source software at all, because once its compiled, the software is controlled by the closed machine language developed by nasty companies such as Intel who just want to keep people under their thumb... uh, what?
I realise that this is splitting hairs, yet since they are cofinancing Pixar's films, Disney are technically producing them. I assert that Disney's role is to distribute, and they leave the production to the (currently) sympathetic and benign Pixar. (Refer to article).
I did refer to the article, but I also referred to IMDB. Clicking on various production personnel, I noticed that there were a lot of Disney people on staff on every one of those movies.
Right off the top, the excellent voice talent for Monsters Inc was provided by Disney casting directors. There were several Disney artists serving as art directors in all the movies. There are other examples as well.
I feel that the article unfairly excluded the creative work that Disney did.
Slashdot Mirror
It was tricky as I was both Vader and Skywalker and we only had one Storm Trooper
The true (and most frightening) question is "you did you dress up in the Leia slave costime?"
500 people died after burning for 6 days
Ouch. That had to hurt.
Personally, I probably would put the flaming people out after a day or two.
Three days.. tops.
*sigh* Take off the tinfoil hat, for Pete's sake. Your brain is beginning to cook.
I heard that bin Laden is on the board of some or many defense contractors. He supposedly has NOT been removed.
That would have been MOHAMED bin Laden. He's the former head of the Bin Laden Group, an international construction conglomerate that has large corporate interests in many different industries. He is no longer on the board of any company, since he has passed away.
Mohamed was Osama's father, but there was no great love between them. Mohamed disowned his son decades ago and helped pressure the Saudi royals to yank his Saudi citizenship. The etire family has turned its back on their most famous member because he's a serious embarassment to them and very, very bad for their business. Mind you, the bin Laden family is quite rich and very happy with the status quo in Saudi Arabia. The absolute last thing Mohamed's family wants is the idiology that Osama promotes.
Not render a scene. Program a scene.
Okay. Same answer. How long is a piece of string?
I can program a cube spinning on its axis that lasts for 1800 frames (1 minute at 30fps) in about 3 minutes. Want something more complex? It'll take more time.
A free graphical front end for POV-Ray is Moray [stmuc.comx].
Well, to be clear, Moray is not free. Its nagware. A fully registered license costs 80 Euros. However, the unregistered version is not crippled. It does nag a lot though.
can I use your polls for scientific research?
I sure hope so! If there's one thing that needs a lot of scientific research, that one thing would be CowboyNeal.
(/tongue-in-cheek)
But catch her in a dishonesty before you slam her.
Why? She doesn't offer that to writers at BusinessWeek who disagree with her.
But catch her in dishonesty I have:
ITEM ONE:
She put words in the mouth of a columnist at LinuxInsider (Phil Albert) claiming he said something he never said then strawmanned him to death. The original article was "lost" on Groklaw, but you can read his response to PJ accusing her of putting words in his mouth here.
To quote PJ (from memory, since the original is gone): Basically, he [Albert] basically told businesses not to use the GPL.
Albert's response: My column on the GPL 2.0 was a product review, not an attack on the GPL itself -- and anyway, it was mostly favorable. I never said that companies should not use it, and I am not opposed to the concept of copyleft.
I read Albert's original article. He's right. By my reading, he never even implied it. PJ made that up out of whole cloth.
ITEM TWO:
She did a character assassination on Gosling because they don't see eye-to-eye on Java and the GPL -- and because Sun isn't doing what PJ and RMS wants them to do with their own software (release the Sun JDK under the GPL). However in the BusinessWeek rant, she says the authors should license however they want. Nice double standard. To quote PJ: You have to admit, there is something comical in a commentary asking the authors to change their license. Yes, there is PJ. Yes, there is. Leave Gosling alone for not wanting to release the Sun JDK under your favorite license.
ITEM THREE:
Here's another double standard form PJ. From today no less:
Journalists are a cynical bunch. They've seen it all, heard execs and politicians spin baloney, and endured endless press conferences where they've been told what turn out to be lies, so they can be forgiven for ending up Being From Missouri. The thing about journalists is, they do usually know what is really happening. They may not print what they know, or all they know, or they may feel compelled to slant it to suit their editors/owners. But they know.
Wow! Journalists suddenly "know"! Despite 18 months of PJ's rants that journalists will report whatever FUD is put in front of them. I could quote them, but why bother. You've read them for months.
In this case, PJ is right. Journalists "may feel compelled to slant it to suit their editors/owners". PJ should know. According to the top of the Groklaw site, she's now a "journalist".
- - - - - -
You know, I'm not doing anything with this post that PJ doesn't do every day with Groklaw. I'm using PJ's own contradictory words against her. The difference is, I admit that I'm biased against PJ and I'm slanted against her rants. I also don't call myself a "journalist", which implies that I'm being objective. I'm not. I admit that. That is what separates me from her.
For the record, the output of a "journalist" is not a "blog".
Groklaw is a blog. Always has been.
Oh, BS. Groklaw USED to be a blog. Maybe 18 months ago. However, back then it wasn't hosted by ibiblio. Back then, it didn't have its own membership database. Back then, PJ didn't refer to Groklaw as a "community movement". Back then, PJ was a nobody and she stuck to the facts. Now she uses Groklaw as her bully pulpit. Its no blog.
Groklaw "has zero credibility"? Zero? All those legal papers quoted and analyzed, and that leads to zero credibililty, just because your opinion on life differs from that of PJ? That doesn't pass the smell test.
Zero. Just as much as I don't trust research funded by Microsoft nor I trust research from anyone, no matter how well-quoted, who leans so hard toward one agenda. When PJ attacks anyone who doesn't praise the GPL, even others in the open source community, how can I know she's not putting the thumb on the scales? Its very, very easy to ignore research that goes against her point of view and over-hype the research that does. I don't trust PJ not to do that.
Besides, PJ now has financial stake in this. Her employment with OSRM (which was quoted in the article she slammed, interestingly enough) has put her in a strange conflict-of-interests. How can I know she's not a mouthpiece for OSRM?
Businesses would have a very hard time if all FOSS code disappeared.
Really? That just makes no sense to me. Business seemed to exist and operate just fine before FOSS. Most businesses exist just fine today without FOSS. Most businesses are small businesses and most small businesses use Windows. That's a fact. No large businesses rely solely on open source and all have closed source alternatives (UNIX, etc.) If all the open source software suddenly disappeared, I tend to doubt our businesses would collapse. That's the silliest arguement I've ever heard.
That didn't sound much like a "demonstration on the need for more research". That read like a stream-of-consciousness religious rant to me.
Trust me. We have eyes. We see. We will be the wiser. And you will eventually go out of business if you follow that path or you won't be a Linux company any more. Here's why: the FOSS community isn't dependent on business at all. It's the other way around. And if you are foolish and short-sighted enough to think you don't need community support, try it.
Whee-ha! Time for Prozac, PJ.
In all seriousness though, when it comes to things that are not directly related to a lawsuit, Groklaw has about as much research in it as a grade-school term paper: Just enough to get by without it smelling too highly of bullshit. Groklaw has zero credibility anymore, at least with me. Its a zealot site. Nothing more.
Besides, PJ is just plain wrong. The FOSS community relies just as much on business as business relies on it. Companies have invested billions in FOSS and, most importantly, have given it "street cred". If IBM is willing to invest over $1,000,000,000 (that's a LOT of 0's) in Linux, it MUST be worth something. Bottom line is that if it wasn't for some very large companies such as IBM with very deep pockets, Linux and open source software would be absolutely nowhere near as advanced, as recognized, or as accepted as it is today. Sorry to burst your bubble, PJ.
SWT, the last time I checked, uses GTK widgets on Linux
Actually, it has both GTK and Motif bindings on Linux.
I have no idea if they are gonna write one for Qt.
Very, very unlikely. Qt's dual licensing nicely prevents that.
SWT was written for use in Eclipse. Eclipse is open source and distributed free. But! Eclipse is also sold as part of closed source software such as WebSphere Studio App Developer.
If SWT had Qt bindings, commercial products developed from the Eclipse codebase would require the purchase of a Qt license from TrollSoft. That would seriously encumber of the value and the purpose of the Eclipse project.
I completely agree with you on your post. Especially this:
If the owner of the site actually WAS Fallwell (regardless of the content), or was a business with that name but in an unrelated industry (first come first serve in cases of conflict I'd say)
However, not always the case. One should only look as far as www.nissan.com.
Uzi Nissan has run self-named businesses in the United States for decades. When Mr. Nissan started Nissan International, Nissan Motors was known in the US as "Datsun". From the success of Nissan International, he created Nissan Computers. In 1994, he registered the domain name "www.nissan.com".
You can probably guess what happened. SIX years later, Nissan Motors sued Mr. Nissan for $10 million. But, the Nissan is the guy's name and the name of his business. He used the name in the US longer than Nissan Motors did. He is in a completely unrelated industry. He registered a trademark with the Nissan name a decade ago, years before the lawsuit. Slam dunk for Mr. Nissan, right?
Wrong.
While Nissan Motors didn't get their $10 million and lost most of their claims, there's no question that Nissan Motors won the case in every sense of the word. You can read more about it here
Having stood along with the crowds along the Champs-Elysee on the last day of the Tour, I don't know if I'd call it "riveting".
The last day is mostly for the cameras and the crowds. The winner is already known and has practically no chance of losing at that point. The leaders don't even bother trying to win the stage and come in waaaaay in the back of pack, often over 20 seconds behind the stage leader. 20 seconds doesn't seem like a lot, but that actually puts them at the back of the pack. Lance is known to drink champaigne and chat with reporters while "racing" on his last day.
This year, Lance came in 114th.
The last day of the Tour is a lot of fun with the crowds, the booths, the parades (lots of parades) and the music, but its not "riveting". However, I did get lots of great photos and movies as they passed me over 20 times!
It's on the net, just not on the 6 o clock news.
Wow! Its on the "net"? Damn! It must be true then! The "net" would never lie to us!
One chapter won't tell you much...
It'll sure tell me if attempting to read the story with my 18-month-old 1.4GHz AMD/GF4MX eyeballs will blow their retinas out.
Excellent and well done. Only wish I had the mod points.
:)
Although, I don't know which was funnier: your subtle humor or the person who modded your joke up as "Informative"
Quite a leap to make just by reading the sentence differently.
Not at all. Let me help you with the alternate parsing:
load it up with (windows or something) (free [of charge])
Although, I would grant that if that was the intent, it would be more lucid to place a comma after "something". However, grammatically, it is valid. With this parsing, it is no different (grammatically) than saying:
load it up with windows or linux free.
I don't think that was the intent of the sentence, but it is understandable how it could have been confusing.
What moron modded this guy up? He obviously didn't read the article.
This guy didn't invent anything. He didn't work for research and development (he was a business-guy). He didn't get fired over DRM or anything close. He was fired over a compensation dispute.
COBOL programmers a a dying breed... but it scares me that its still out there... lurking
I know you meant to be funny. However, there are a LOT of COBOL programmers out there. While there definately were a lot more in the past, and there was a lot of them that came out of the woodwork for the Y2K thingie, COBOL programmers are long from extinct.
Most COBOL programs that existed for the Y2K thing still exist 4 years later. They were patched for the date conversion, but not replaced. In fact, I've got a COBOL programmer on my staff who is writing NEW COBOL programs (interface modules between the old CICS stuff and new Java-based stuff on a 390).
Who cares about the technology of Formula 1? It took them another 408 attempts to get it right!
(its a joke people)
take it you haven't actually read the license? I also got a copy of the Java RPM from Red Hat. I presume that Red Hat has/had some special deal with Sun. But if you really read the license you'll find that you aren't permitted to redistribute it.
Okay... this is all mixed up. The RPM I referred to was IBM's, not Sun's -- so any RedHat deal with Sun has nothing to do with any of this. So have I read Sun's license? No, because I use IBM's SDK. Do they have a redistribution restriction? No. They even released the compiler part of the SDK as open source (its called Jikes).
Furthermore, no one needs to redistribute the SDK. The most anyone would ever need to redistribute (and only in rare cases) would be the JRE. Later in your post you mention blackdown. I found on blackdown.org, in less than 10 seconds, that you are allowed to redistribute the JRE -- even in commercial applications.
IBM's sdk differs in several ways from Sun's sdk. I said "If your project depends on Sun's sdk". There are several projects that have slightly differing sdk's and many programs are dependant on the particular one choosen.
Bull. The whole point of Java is interoperability. In order to be "Java" it has to adhere 100% to the published Java specification. IBM's SDK does this. Anything written using IBM's SDK will work just fine with the corresponding JVM written by Sun. While there are differences, those have to do with the internal implementation of the specification. IBM's version of the stack, for example, is about 20% faster than Sun's in Java 1.3. However, they behave identically.
(E.g., gcj can't run programs dependant on several pieces of Sun's sdk, because there is no equivalent functionality. Because Sun's sdk ISN'T open source, but is released in a manner that prohibits this. That's one of the reasons for gnu/classpath.)
Sun's SDK is not open source. That is correct. But the specification of their SDK is widely published. The only reason why GCJ doesn't have "equivalent functionality" is because GCJ either didn't implement it by choice or they they haven't figured out how to compile it in a manner that doesn't rely on a VM. It has nothing to do with anything Sun did.
Sun forced them to be that restrictive, even though they developed the compiler essentially independently. (I.e., not independently enough.)
Laugh!! No they didn't!! They took Sun's JDK source code and ported it under license! It's not a cleanroom implementation by any means! They say so very plainly all over their website.
Sun's license forbids any one besides them to distribute the Java sdk.
This isn't true at all. I do my Java development using IBM's Java SDK (which is available for Linux as an RPM). There are several Java SDKs available that are produced by people who aren't Sun. I saw on another thread here a link to a webpage that lists some of them.
Sun's license also doesn't obligate them to support the Java sdk.
This is true, but kinda irrelevant. The same thing is true with every open source license. There's nothing obligating anyone from supporting, say, gcc. Given that Sun isn't the only people producing SDKs (see point 1), then if Sun stopped supporting Java, then IBM or someone else would.
Therefore your project is not totally free if it depends on Sun's code.
As I said earlier, my code doesn't depend one bit on Sun code. I personally don't use any Sun code at all in my Java development. However, I do use Sun Java specifications (which IBM's SDK adheres to).
However, many open source projects (including Linux) adhere to closed standards, be it from W3C or IEEE or Sun.
Now I'll grand that discontinuation is a bit extreme, but massive code changes have happened already, and products that depended on the prior versions have gone off the market, so this isn't a hypothetical example.
I don't understand this argument. Yes, Java has evolved over the last decade. But so has a lot of other things, including open source things. Is your argument that backwards-compatitibility is required for "truly" free software? There's nothing preventing anyone from including an old JVM (and every version of the JVM is available) with their software -- or porting their software to the latest specifications. I don't think that "it must always be able to work on the latest and greatest version of the language to be truely free" is a valid argument.
I suggest you read a book on arguing.
Okay.
You're not too good with this logic thing.
That would be, ummmm.. "ad hominem"
You would have to show it to be invalid, not just unsubstantiated.
That would be... that's right: "shifting the burden of proof". (Magic exists because no one has proven it doesn't.)
The only conclusion you can draw from this is that the software is therefore not truly free, and that presumably RMS wants truly free software.
No, the only conclusion I can make is that just because RMS says its so, it doesn't necessarily make it so.
My whole point, and my only point, was a rejection of your (still) unsubstaniated presumption that the tons and tons of free/open source software written in the Java language is not "truly" free.
The only logical fallicy, I'm afraid, is yours when you say, essentially: "Java software is not truly free because Java software is not truly free." That simply doesn't fly with me. The conclusions don't hold if the given claim is unsubstantiated and questionable.
To be truly free [speech] software, your language cannot be under a corporate thumb like that.
You say that as if its a universal axiom, yet its strangely unsupported in any way.
However, there is a LOT of open source Java software (the excellent work going on at Apache Jakarta being just one of many fine examples). There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that Java programmers can't play in the open source arena along with anyone else.
I find it very disturbing that RMS (and you) would attempt to verbally exclude all the open source software that thousands of developers are giving to the world every day simply to take a cheap political stab at Sun. I would like to think that F/OSS is INCLUSIONARY not exclusionary. However, I'm starting to think that RMS's position is becoming more and more that the only "true" open source software is that which is compiled using GNU tools. Everyone else can go rot.
Not to mention, taking RMS's stupid logic to the extreme, there's no open source software at all, because once its compiled, the software is controlled by the closed machine language developed by nasty companies such as Intel who just want to keep people under their thumb... uh, what?
I realise that this is splitting hairs, yet since they are cofinancing Pixar's films, Disney are technically producing them. I assert that Disney's role is to distribute, and they leave the production to the (currently) sympathetic and benign Pixar. (Refer to article).
I did refer to the article, but I also referred to IMDB. Clicking on various production personnel, I noticed that there were a lot of Disney people on staff on every one of those movies.
Right off the top, the excellent voice talent for Monsters Inc was provided by Disney casting directors. There were several Disney artists serving as art directors in all the movies. There are other examples as well.
I feel that the article unfairly excluded the creative work that Disney did.