Except for the time a datacable was loose in our car causing the servo and fuel injection to randomly shut down thereby halting the car.
Modern car computers fail, not often, but it happens. The point is, these systems are redundant. The break, gas and stearing is always mechanically linked to the actual controls only aided by the electronic (think about how ABS, servos, EPS etc. works.) This makes these systems redundant. You can't however connect a joystick mechanically the stearing causing undefined behaviour on malfunction.
The problem with this is security. Would you trust electronics this much in 90km/h? I wouldn't it's not like an airplane where there's a chance of escape or like a train that pretty much stays on its track. What if the stick malfunctioned? You would get thrown off the road, very unpleasing.
In mothern cars there is always backup for the current electronics. Should your servo fail, you'll still be able to stear, same goes for the break servo. If the transmition blows your car comes to a (slightly dramatic) halt.
I don't know about you but I'll hang on to the steering wheel and foot controled accellerator, break and clutch. No way I'm going to trust spilling coke on my drivers stick getting a false reading unless there's total, manual redundancy.
If you actually read the article you would see that Andalucia is Spains largest region with 7.5 million inhabitants. So I guess the entire spanish population is likely to know what the region of Andalucia is. And that's roughly 40 million people.
I guess you not knowing where it is doesn't meen that others don't nor that it's not an important region.
The article says the manually check the numbers. My guess would be then senior officer approving the blacklisting would make a quick call to the number to check whether or not it's what the ad says it is.
Just want to correct a minor historical error you made:
During WW2, we basically declared war on Hitler. A lot of "innocent Germans" were killed during that war, but I think most agree that sometimes a terrible price is necessary to bring peace to the world.
The US didn't declare war on Germany. Germany was the agressor. WW2 was triggered when Hitlers took Poland. Europe was then fed up by Germanys imperialism and declared war. The US on this time stood back and watch. When they entered it was in true self defence (perl harbour) and it was allready a fullscale war where Germany couldn't complain about losses (they were the agressor, remember.)
DRM is impossible partially because protection against only the casual-copying model implies that someone can copy the contents and thereby uploding it onto a P2P network, burn it on a CD for a friend or sell burnt CD's meaning we also get napterization (why did Felton fail to mention this?) Also there's the fact that the antinapsterization bulletproof protection is both digitally impossible (reverse engineering is always possible (although it can be made very hard through hardware)) and analoguosly impossible (there's always hi-fi capture.) I might not be able to copy a file but I can always just re-record it.
The only possible DRM - that I can imagine - is burying storageless chips deep into our brains with builtin credit card reader that streams contents encrypted from a sattelite server on demand. That thought however is awful.
The only thing that might help is: public-education (the copyright owner has rights too you know) and/or buisiniss remodelling. Believe it or not but developing software takes millions of $ (even Windows) and record labels are not pure evil (although sometimes not far from it) and serve for the artist and the public as an important middleman.
Shouldn't software developers and artists get paid like everybody in society, they do produce valuable products (even - to some degree - Windows.)
Shouldn't be doing this, but I can't resist. Before the partially/.'ed article loaded I did look it up at E2:
Lines Of Code. A particularly clueless method of "measuring" the output of a programmer, motivated by the fact that "we're paying her to write lines of code!"
This ignores such trivial objective matters as the difficulty or quality of the code, as well as the obvious subjective matters (I can write 5 good lines one day and 1000 the next).
When a suit starts talking LOC (and kLOC), it's time to break out the code generators: M4, YACC, LEX, and most importantly custom-built programs that write programs. All of these enable the programmer to leverage effort to create LOC (to use a turn of phrase said suits might understand).
I don't think you've really thought this thouroughly through.
Hamsters need food, let say 10 kg a year per hamster and then we assume each hamster manages to generate 10W and that we need three shifts. That's 3 * 10 / 10 == 3 kg of salad per watt, now to get a terrawatt you'd need 3 * 1,000,000,000 kg of salad which is a lot. Not to mention that you'll need support hamsters to bread new hamsters for when the ones in the wheels drop dead. That alone would easily double, or maybe even triple the amount of salad needed for each watt. You might be able to justify some of the salad usage by using the droppings as fertilizer, but still... I think you would - mildly put - dent the worlds food usage statistics.
Now legistlation that would require every comb to be connected to your local electrical plant, that could work.
I'm getting this plug-in and I'm going to test it because it sounds great, but it sounds creapishly like certain other pieces of software and licensing clauses.
Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)
I don't doubt that this piece of software is completely innocent (it being made by a student,) but who knows when someone makes a "new and improved Audioscrobbler." That really profiles you and stores this information for resale and profit without you really knowing it. Sure you might prefere targeted music adwertising, but be warned such advertising would only come from a preselected, narrow artist pool.
Now, I'm using Audioscrobbler, but if it ever becomes mainstream I would be careful using any commercial equivalent (or even a commercial Audioscrobbler.)
Re:He is insane...
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already."
Having something in common isn't the only reason for a company to aquire another company. Maybe Sony would like to get into the server market, but doesn't have the know-how. It seems like you think that for big-corp Sony to challenge IBM and Microsoft they just have to do it, but IMHO it's not that simple and that's why it would be smart of them to aquire SUN. SUN's got the infrastructure, competence and management in place and would only require tuning to get rapidly fitted into Sony Corp. Et voilá; Sony makes servers and - more - money.
".., the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market."
That's EXCACTLY why Sony would wan't SUN. SUN's got something they haven't got and would therefor be a nice addition to the Sony family. You've got to remember that big corporations like Sony stop growing if they don't get into new markets, and for them growth is what it's all about.
"H2O2 can be violently reactive and in fact can even be hypergolic if mixed with certain compounds causing inadvertent accidents."
Never seen the real thing, but read up on the subject a while back. H2O2 isn't hypergolic only mixed with certain compounds, rather the other way around. You can only keep strong solutions of H2O2 (70-100%+ I guess.) IIRC you can only store it in clean environment with pure water (not tap water, pure H2O.) Any impurity in the solution or container will cause it to violently decompose, which is why Carmack wants it and maybe why he doesn't get it (seems unlikely, reading his post.)
React OS isn't written based on Windows NT code so a lawsuit could be hard. In addititon Microsoft isn't all that heavy on suing people that tries to make MS stuff cross platform compatible. Wine, WineX, Crossover, Dosemu, Mono, countless.doc loaders/converters have been left pretty much untouched. I guess that's because they're not really seeking to profit/performe on Microsofts R&D rather supply an alternative.
Lindows however who MS saw as a marketing threat since their sort of trying market and sell something that looks and souncs like Windows.
This goes for other branches of engineering too. Engineering isn't use formula A and compute B. Engineering is building your personal toolbox of math, physics, chemistry (etc.) and practical skills. On assignments and exams you get a problem too solve and there might be several ways of solving the problem. Getting the correct answer is just a minor detail, it's the reasoning (and understanding of the problem) that counts. This way you can have all correct answers and get a bad grade or no correct answers and get a... well maybe not A, but a decent grade (B's decent.)
"If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music."
But then no music would reach the consumer. How do you figure that "... marketing/distribution/hyping..." isn't essential for music to be sold but for a airplane to be sold. You could put all those Boeing engineers, with all the parts and the managers, and get a plane. But which customers know it's there and for sale if not for Boeing's "... marketing/distribution/hyping..."?
"At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution,... So you get my point, but do you think that all the record corps do is print CD's, nothing else? It might not be very hard - given todays technology - to distribute music, but face the fact; PR and promotion - which one of the record corp's main field of interest - is important to get out the popular music (although much is crap.) In addition record corporations send artists on tours (you don't get real "live" performance no matter how sofisticated technology is,) make sure they're properly supported. Most important is that to distribute massive amounts of music you need a massive amount of servers, sysadmins, and a huge pipe to the net. This isn't cheap and someone needs to do the job.
Granted, the current state of the music industry is to much money and conservatism. Their biggest flaw is the unability to embrace new technology in a way that would benefit them and the artists. It seems they're to focused on preserving the current market instead of creating new ones. By doing so they hurt consumers. They don't realise that DRM is technologically impossible and that the DMCA is consumer unfriendly.
To say the recording industry is bloat however only shows that you have a view that's just as narrow as theirs.
Well, lets see: NSA, CIA, FBI + other similar intelligence agencies in the other 95% of the world. And then there's other valuable government databases, bank systems. And maybe various mafia organisations, definitly columbian drug cartels (who're said to have one of the most advanced computer networks.) And then there's Saddam Hussein, North Korea, the US government. And all those I've forgotten.
(One might also say that the RIAA, MPAA and BSA believe they have those kind of enemies.)
Maybe not the best comparsion as the third reich lost those laws when they lost a war and were put under control of foreigners.
I can't think of any other, more valid, example so I actually disagree. When passed, laws are hard to remove. When was the last time you heard more regular laws being changed without there being a clear change in government? (Going from an oppressive to a democratic, non oppressive.)
Kind of offtopic, but isn't Real beaten-down-by-windows-media-player? Doesn't Microsoft now controll the market? It was a simple statement of fact and I'm sure michael "would much rather use a cross-platform, free solution such as Helix as opposed to the DRM'ing-you-and-all-your-files program known as Windows Media Player." It's not like it implies that Real/Helix will be beaten by WMP, rather that - in terms of market share - it is (beaten.) At least for now.
The dotcoms didn't sell websites for millions of dollars (I guess they wouldn't have gone under then,) but got millions of dollars from investors to create a website that were to sell/promote a service. The website was the business and the dotcoms went out because they blew millions on websites that weren't worth more than a few thousands, which is what businesses like the author charge.
The author chose bad wording, but still... the point's there.
The norwegian system is built up by three stages: Tingretten, Lagmansretten and Høyesterett (the supreme court.) In that order. The first instance - where Johansen was acquited - consisted of one professional judge and two laymen. The second instance consists of a jury with where a person must be found guilty by at least half the members (or maybe it was 2/3.) The supreme court is much like the american with 7 (I think) professional judges.
There is no such thing as double jeopardy in Norway, but you don't automatically get a re-trial based on an appeal. Between the first two stages (where the case is now) I believe it's possible to appeal simply because you disagree. This means that if you can argue your appeal well, introduce new evidence or something like that you get a re-trial. However you can only appeal to the supreme court based on wrong utilisation of the law, interpertation of the law or technical errors in which they can either order a re-trial, adjust the sentence or dismiss the case.
Now I've probably missed a great deal of points and said things that aren't correct, but this should enlighten you're view on the Norwegian courts. (Which believe it or not differ from the American.)
As a Norwegian I'm a bit surprised that Økokrim appealed the sentence. It's normal for prosecution to appeal, but in this case it was a pretty clear acquittal. However the background for the appeal is (as the article states) not ready yet.
However my concerne now is that if the appeal goes through (I believe that - in Norway - most appeals at this level do) it will be tried in front of a jury, which means this case can be on hold for ever. In the previous instance they had trouble finding only 2 laymen who could understand the technicalities of the case.
As I read the GPL Rosen's wrong. A GPL'd library can not be used in non-GPL software, here's one reason:
Considering the release of the LGPL it's clear that the author of the GPL didn't want any linking to GPL software from proprietary -/non GPL software. And there is - IIRC - in US law a clause about understanding a license based on it's intent or something like that. (IANAL)
Now, the only solution to this trouble is for programmers to become more license aware. They should know what limitations they are putting on a program and especially on a library. It's OK to license programs under the GPL, but IMHO libraries should be licensed under the LGPL (which is a good license) or a BSD-like.
Sadly it seems that today many people put things under the GPL without thinking, it's become the de-facto license for OSS and that's not good, at all. IMHO the worst example is - dare I say it - the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel requires external modules to link to it thus making a legal quagmire. The GPL was suited when Linux was small, but to get widespread adapting (embedded devices and better commercial driver support) it should change to a less restrictive license. (The LGPL's reverse engineering clause would rule it out, but something BSD-like with some restrictions could be nice. And, luckily, tracking down all kernel authors wouldn't be my job.)
Proprietary software is OK, as long as it gets the job done well.
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Except for the time a datacable was loose in our car causing the servo and fuel injection to randomly shut down thereby halting the car.
Modern car computers fail, not often, but it happens. The point is, these systems are redundant. The break, gas and stearing is always mechanically linked to the actual controls only aided by the electronic (think about how ABS, servos, EPS etc. works.) This makes these systems redundant. You can't however connect a joystick mechanically the stearing causing undefined behaviour on malfunction.
The problem with this is security. Would you trust electronics this much in 90km/h? I wouldn't it's not like an airplane where there's a chance of escape or like a train that pretty much stays on its track. What if the stick malfunctioned? You would get thrown off the road, very unpleasing.
In mothern cars there is always backup for the current electronics. Should your servo fail, you'll still be able to stear, same goes for the break servo. If the transmition blows your car comes to a (slightly dramatic) halt.
I don't know about you but I'll hang on to the steering wheel and foot controled accellerator, break and clutch. No way I'm going to trust spilling coke on my drivers stick getting a false reading unless there's total, manual redundancy.
If you actually read the article you would see that Andalucia is Spains largest region with 7.5 million inhabitants. So I guess the entire spanish population is likely to know what the region of Andalucia is. And that's roughly 40 million people.
I guess you not knowing where it is doesn't meen that others don't nor that it's not an important region.
The article says the manually check the numbers. My guess would be then senior officer approving the blacklisting would make a quick call to the number to check whether or not it's what the ad says it is.
Now the fp's will appear even sooner.
btw. maybe fp.
Just want to correct a minor historical error you made:
During WW2, we basically declared war on Hitler. A lot of "innocent Germans" were killed during that war, but I think most agree that sometimes a terrible price is necessary to bring peace to the world.
The US didn't declare war on Germany. Germany was the agressor. WW2 was triggered when Hitlers took Poland. Europe was then fed up by Germanys imperialism and declared war. The US on this time stood back and watch. When they entered it was in true self defence (perl harbour) and it was allready a fullscale war where Germany couldn't complain about losses (they were the agressor, remember.)
DRM is impossible partially because protection against only the casual-copying model implies that someone can copy the contents and thereby uploding it onto a P2P network, burn it on a CD for a friend or sell burnt CD's meaning we also get napterization (why did Felton fail to mention this?) Also there's the fact that the antinapsterization bulletproof protection is both digitally impossible (reverse engineering is always possible (although it can be made very hard through hardware)) and analoguosly impossible (there's always hi-fi capture.) I might not be able to copy a file but I can always just re-record it.
The only possible DRM - that I can imagine - is burying storageless chips deep into our brains with builtin credit card reader that streams contents encrypted from a sattelite server on demand. That thought however is awful.
The only thing that might help is: public-education (the copyright owner has rights too you know) and/or buisiniss remodelling. Believe it or not but developing software takes millions of $ (even Windows) and record labels are not pure evil (although sometimes not far from it) and serve for the artist and the public as an important middleman.
Shouldn't software developers and artists get paid like everybody in society, they do produce valuable products (even - to some degree - Windows.)
Shouldn't be doing this, but I can't resist. Before the partially /.'ed article loaded I did look it up at E2:
Lines Of Code.
A particularly clueless method of "measuring" the output of a programmer, motivated by the fact that "we're paying her to write lines of code!"
This ignores such trivial objective matters as the difficulty or quality of the code, as well as the obvious subjective matters (I can write 5 good lines one day and 1000 the next).
When a suit starts talking LOC (and kLOC), it's time to break out the code generators: M4, YACC, LEX, and most importantly custom-built programs that write programs. All of these enable the programmer to leverage effort to create LOC (to use a turn of phrase said suits might understand).
And that's just plane wrong in this context;
LOC == Libraries of Congress
I don't think you've really thought this thouroughly through.
... I think you would - mildly put - dent the worlds food usage statistics.
Hamsters need food, let say 10 kg a year per hamster and then we assume each hamster manages to generate 10W and that we need three shifts. That's 3 * 10 / 10 == 3 kg of salad per watt, now to get a terrawatt you'd need 3 * 1,000,000,000 kg of salad which is a lot. Not to mention that you'll need support hamsters to bread new hamsters for when the ones in the wheels drop dead. That alone would easily double, or maybe even triple the amount of salad needed for each watt. You might be able to justify some of the salad usage by using the droppings as fertilizer, but still
Now legistlation that would require every comb to be connected to your local electrical plant, that could work.
I'm getting this plug-in and I'm going to test it because it sounds great, but it sounds creapishly like certain other pieces of software and licensing clauses.
Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)
I don't doubt that this piece of software is completely innocent (it being made by a student,) but who knows when someone makes a "new and improved Audioscrobbler." That really profiles you and stores this information for resale and profit without you really knowing it. Sure you might prefere targeted music adwertising, but be warned such advertising would only come from a preselected, narrow artist pool.
Now, I'm using Audioscrobbler, but if it ever becomes mainstream I would be careful using any commercial equivalent (or even a commercial Audioscrobbler.)
"But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already."
.., the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market."
Having something in common isn't the only reason for a company to aquire another company. Maybe Sony would like to get into the server market, but doesn't have the know-how. It seems like you think that for big-corp Sony to challenge IBM and Microsoft they just have to do it, but IMHO it's not that simple and that's why it would be smart of them to aquire SUN. SUN's got the infrastructure, competence and management in place and would only require tuning to get rapidly fitted into Sony Corp. Et voilá; Sony makes servers and - more - money.
"
That's EXCACTLY why Sony would wan't SUN. SUN's got something they haven't got and would therefor be a nice addition to the Sony family. You've got to remember that big corporations like Sony stop growing if they don't get into new markets, and for them growth is what it's all about.
"H2O2 can be violently reactive and in fact can even be hypergolic if mixed with certain compounds causing inadvertent accidents."
Never seen the real thing, but read up on the subject a while back. H2O2 isn't hypergolic only mixed with certain compounds, rather the other way around. You can only keep strong solutions of H2O2 (70-100%+ I guess.) IIRC you can only store it in clean environment with pure water (not tap water, pure H2O.) Any impurity in the solution or container will cause it to violently decompose, which is why Carmack wants it and maybe why he doesn't get it (seems unlikely, reading his post.)
React OS isn't written based on Windows NT code so a lawsuit could be hard. In addititon Microsoft isn't all that heavy on suing people that tries to make MS stuff cross platform compatible. Wine, WineX, Crossover, Dosemu, Mono, countless .doc loaders/converters have been left pretty much untouched. I guess that's because they're not really seeking to profit/performe on Microsofts R&D rather supply an alternative.
Lindows however who MS saw as a marketing threat since their sort of trying market and sell something that looks and souncs like Windows.
kJetz kÖnnen kWir kEin K kIn kAlles kWörten kPlassieren.
kExcuse kMy kGerman.
This goes for other branches of engineering too. Engineering isn't use formula A and compute B. Engineering is building your personal toolbox of math, physics, chemistry (etc.) and practical skills. On assignments and exams you get a problem too solve and there might be several ways of solving the problem. Getting the correct answer is just a minor detail, it's the reasoning (and understanding of the problem) that counts. This way you can have all correct answers and get a bad grade or no correct answers and get a ... well maybe not A, but a decent grade (B's decent.)
"If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music."
..." isn't essential for music to be sold but for a airplane to be sold. You could put all those Boeing engineers, with all the parts and the managers, and get a plane. But which customers know it's there and for sale if not for Boeing's "... marketing/distribution/hyping ..."?
... So you get my point, but do you think that all the record corps do is print CD's, nothing else? It might not be very hard - given todays technology - to distribute music, but face the fact; PR and promotion - which one of the record corp's main field of interest - is important to get out the popular music (although much is crap.) In addition record corporations send artists on tours (you don't get real "live" performance no matter how sofisticated technology is,) make sure they're properly supported. Most important is that to distribute massive amounts of music you need a massive amount of servers, sysadmins, and a huge pipe to the net. This isn't cheap and someone needs to do the job.
But then no music would reach the consumer. How do you figure that "... marketing/distribution/hyping
"At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution,
Granted, the current state of the music industry is to much money and conservatism. Their biggest flaw is the unability to embrace new technology in a way that would benefit them and the artists. It seems they're to focused on preserving the current market instead of creating new ones. By doing so they hurt consumers. They don't realise that DRM is technologically impossible and that the DMCA is consumer unfriendly.
To say the recording industry is bloat however only shows that you have a view that's just as narrow as theirs.
Well, lets see:
NSA, CIA, FBI + other similar intelligence agencies in the other 95% of the world. And then there's other valuable government databases, bank systems. And maybe various mafia organisations, definitly columbian drug cartels (who're said to have one of the most advanced computer networks.) And then there's Saddam Hussein, North Korea, the US government. And all those I've forgotten.
(One might also say that the RIAA, MPAA and BSA believe they have those kind of enemies.)
"so, factor in you're going to be going over water, which is frozen and melting?"
... antartica is solid land and some ice at the coast at winter, but mostly solid land.
No
In adition clearing some ice and flattening shouldn't be that expencive, $12 millions the article says.
Maybe not the best comparsion as the third reich lost those laws when they lost a war and were put under control of foreigners.
I can't think of any other, more valid, example so I actually disagree. When passed, laws are hard to remove. When was the last time you heard more regular laws being changed without there being a clear change in government? (Going from an oppressive to a democratic, non oppressive.)
Kind of offtopic, but isn't Real beaten-down-by-windows-media-player? Doesn't Microsoft now controll the market? It was a simple statement of fact and I'm sure michael "would much rather use a cross-platform, free solution such as Helix as opposed to the DRM'ing-you-and-all-your-files program known as Windows Media Player." It's not like it implies that Real/Helix will be beaten by WMP, rather that - in terms of market share - it is (beaten.) At least for now.
The dotcoms didn't sell websites for millions of dollars (I guess they wouldn't have gone under then,) but got millions of dollars from investors to create a website that were to sell/promote a service. The website was the business and the dotcoms went out because they blew millions on websites that weren't worth more than a few thousands, which is what businesses like the author charge.
... the point's there.
The author chose bad wording, but still
IANANL, but this is how I believe it is.
The norwegian system is built up by three stages: Tingretten, Lagmansretten and Høyesterett (the supreme court.) In that order. The first instance - where Johansen was acquited - consisted of one professional judge and two laymen. The second instance consists of a jury with where a person must be found guilty by at least half the members (or maybe it was 2/3.) The supreme court is much like the american with 7 (I think) professional judges.
There is no such thing as double jeopardy in Norway, but you don't automatically get a re-trial based on an appeal. Between the first two stages (where the case is now) I believe it's possible to appeal simply because you disagree. This means that if you can argue your appeal well, introduce new evidence or something like that you get a re-trial. However you can only appeal to the supreme court based on wrong utilisation of the law, interpertation of the law or technical errors in which they can either order a re-trial, adjust the sentence or dismiss the case.
Now I've probably missed a great deal of points and said things that aren't correct, but this should enlighten you're view on the Norwegian courts. (Which believe it or not differ from the American.)
As a Norwegian I'm a bit surprised that Økokrim appealed the sentence. It's normal for prosecution to appeal, but in this case it was a pretty clear acquittal. However the background for the appeal is (as the article states) not ready yet.
However my concerne now is that if the appeal goes through (I believe that - in Norway - most appeals at this level do) it will be tried in front of a jury, which means this case can be on hold for ever. In the previous instance they had trouble finding only 2 laymen who could understand the technicalities of the case.
Everytime someone mentions Blinkenlights I think about StarWars.
(If it hangs then I can tell you it's a complete remake of StarWars episode IV)
As I read the GPL Rosen's wrong. A GPL'd library can not be used in non-GPL software, here's one reason:
Considering the release of the LGPL it's clear that the author of the GPL didn't want any linking to GPL software from proprietary -/non GPL software. And there is - IIRC - in US law a clause about understanding a license based on it's intent or something like that. (IANAL)
Now, the only solution to this trouble is for programmers to become more license aware. They should know what limitations they are putting on a program and especially on a library. It's OK to license programs under the GPL, but IMHO libraries should be licensed under the LGPL (which is a good license) or a BSD-like.
Sadly it seems that today many people put things under the GPL without thinking, it's become the de-facto license for OSS and that's not good, at all. IMHO the worst example is - dare I say it - the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel requires external modules to link to it thus making a legal quagmire. The GPL was suited when Linux was small, but to get widespread adapting (embedded devices and better commercial driver support) it should change to a less restrictive license. (The LGPL's reverse engineering clause would rule it out, but something BSD-like with some restrictions could be nice. And, luckily, tracking down all kernel authors wouldn't be my job.)
Proprietary software is OK, as long as it gets the job done well.