> He asked a VERY legitimate question. In fact, it is one that I am surprised that has not be done so far.
This has been done plenty of times before - just probably not on/. because it isn't really a free/open-source thing to do.
I have licensed several commercial products from other parties with full source and modifcation rights before - but I would regard all the cases as being "commercial / proprietary" software vendors, rather than anywhere near the FOSS world.
If the number of customers is small I would suggest you will probably want a proper contract rather than relying on copyright / EULA. As has been said, ask a lawyer to draw one up. That sort of arrangement is really very common in the commercial software world, plenty of corporate lawyers should be capable of handling it.
If you are looking at wide distribution and really want to rely solely on EULA / copyright, then there are cases where this has been done before that would be worth looking at. One example I can think of is that Microsoft used to ship (way before the "shared source" rubbish) the MFC libraries as modifiable, and in fact re-distributable, (with conditions on your version being renamed to avoid clashes etc.). Might be worth a look at their old licences (or the current ones even - I'm not sure if they still ship MFC as modifiable though). Also in the MS world, Dundas (dundas.com) have shipped commercial grid and chart controls for years with full source code - might be worth loking at their licenses.
> If the FSF continue to push that line then we start to move toward the territory of trying to copyright facts about interfaces which after the SCO fiasco most in the free software community might be wary of?
This can of worms has been opened many times before, long ago, and indeed has upset people in the community.
eg. from 1993:
On the basis of rms current comments I won't be putting anything more under the GPL/LGPL, in fact I'm sufficiently annoyed that rms is claiming interface copyrights that I'm tempted to allow anything but GPL/LGPL code to be linked with my stuff.
GPL or GPL-compatible doesn't change the argument - you are still saying there is a requirement to license your code to comply with a third party license - GPL. Otherwise why is GPL compatibility necessary at all ?
In the case of a GCC plugin that third party would be the FSF, and its license the GPL. The only (copyright related) reason you would have to be compliant with the GPL would be in order to be licensed under the GPL - because you have no licence otherwise. So, in the case of the GPL, saying you comply with the license is the same as saying you have license.
Or in other words, I don't see the difference in this context between being required to state, for example:
"this plugin is distributed under a license from SEGA" (among other licenses)
and
"this plugin is distributed under license A which is compatible with the GPL, in order to comply with license for GCC, which is distributed under license (GPL) from the FSF"
In both cases you are being required to state that you have (= comply with, in GPL case, see above) a third party license.
In SEGA vs. Accolade it was ruled that if you have to effectively make that statement beacuse it is the only way to make your code compatible with the host environment, it is permissible to lie.
> Asking for a honest representation of your own license is a lot different than asking for a string that represents you have a license from a third party.
I'm not sure how it is different.
Since the arguement was that your code needed to be GPL to satisfy the GPL (on the other, third-party, code), your representation that your own license is GPL is representing compliance with a third party license. Since the GPL grants license only on condition of compliance, by representing that you are in compliance you are therefore representing that "you have a license from a third party".
> The point being that by default, Office 2007 saves in the new 2007 format.
This is easily configurable, moreover you can configure it once for all your users using group policy.
> If you use Office 2000, and someone sends you a 2003 or 2007 file, you're forced to upgrade.
No, Office (if patched up to date) will helpfully offer you a plugin download that will enable your _current_ version of Office to read the new file - it doesn't upgrade the whole of office, just an additional file format plugin.
> DOCX is vastly different from the DOC file format.
I think the point the GP was making is that the underlying format structure is the same - one is a binary dump of the document objects, the other is a simple XML dump. The documentation on the xml format can actually help understanding the older binary format.
The fact that it is an XML dump of the old format (based on the internal office data structures) rather than designed as an XML representation was/is a common and major criticism of OOXML.
> Yep... I suppose that's the problem with most current technology (software). No forwards compatibility.
Note that MS have provided plugins to make older versions of Office (back to 2000 I think) forwards compatible with the new 2007 file formats. Read and Write support. If your older version of office is patched uptodate then it will automatically recognise the new file format and offer to download and install the plugin.
The Debian people believe that distributing GPL'd code that links against a GPL-incompatible libc is a violation of the GPL (and they are probably right).
The FSF themselves distribute GPL'd code that links against GPL-incompatible libcs (including Suns) - and they have done for years (in fact decades), way before CDDL exsited, when Solaris / SunOS libcs were proprietary.
The FSF are right, "the Debian people" are wrong. If there was one thing the system libraries exception clearly covers, it is libc.
No, you're wrong. The offer only has to be passed on with the distribution. The offer itself has to be redistributable (so the recipient can redistribute what they recieved), but nothing in the GPL obliges the distributor to distribute the offer to "everyone".
3(b) requires you to provide an offer that itself is redistributable to any third party. This is so that the recipient can redistribute the binary + your source offer. There is no requirement that you separately distribute the offer to "everyone".
Any recipient could post the your binary + source offer on a website for everyone to use (and you would have to honour the source offer), however if no recipient chooses to do so, "everyone" does not get the offer.
Sounds like things are the same the world over... with the key words being "minority shareholder".
Unless it's a public company (and sometimes even then) that tends to mean you have the right to get shafted (and not a lot else).
The majority (which could well be the guy you fell out with plus the one or two he bribed) can vote you down and do pretty much what they want - including selling for much less than the company is worth, or just diluting your equity to worthless. Of course, they'll be involved in whatever corporate entity benefits from the transaction - and you won't.
Oh, you might have lots of fancy contracts protecting minority shareholder rights etc. - but in the end they'll just be more worthless paper to file with the share certificates.
As a grad student you still have much to learn, including where people go to earn money after PhDs.
By "financial types" you probably mean quants. You might be interested to know that most (almost all) of them have mathematical PhDs (including many in physics), and before they finished them, they were the "serious researchers" you are lookin up to now.
And, yes, they use excel (amongst other things).
[In my day the scientists did in fact use Windows, or Unix (for those with bigger budgets). Linux if you want to spend your time hacking your OS and apps and never finishing your research. Mac ?!? - I think we had one in the corner for DTP, but research ? Maybe times have changed...]
If you are only a grad student you have much still to learn, including the range of places people go to actually earn money to live on after PhDs.
By "financial types" you probably mean quants. You should be aware that they pretty much universally have PhDs in maths or heavily mathematical fields (including physics). Before becoming quants they were very likely the "serious researcher"s you are looking up to now.
The really really funny part is that if your Office (2003) installation is patched up to date it will a) recognise the new file formats and b) prompt you to download the _free_ (as in beer) plugin to read and write them.
Microsoft really bent over backwards making old versions capable of reading _and writing_ the new 2007 formats, and yet still people are paying them "250 per copy" to upgrade for no reason. I wish my customers were that dumb...
> They thought about making it bigger, but in the end decided that should be enough for anybody.
Except nobody told the dev team who went and removed the limit anyway...
[yes, it is gone, as of 2007]
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
Yep - that is why it was missing from my list:-)
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
Depending on which survey you read - as I said. If you follow the links I quoted it is number 3.
If you want to know which languages are in demand for real _jobs_ (whereas Tiobe seems to look at what is being discussed most on the net, at least in part) then use surveys like the one I referred you to (where C# = #3).
A quick jobs search for my local area on a major jobs site showed 43 for Java, 79 for C#, 71 for VB, 194 for SQL, and 29 for C++. Perl and Python are down in single figures. YMMV.
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
> Has C# truly surpassed C, C++ and Java?
No, but it is up there with them - which is what the quote said "ONE OF the most widely used..."
Of course, YMMV and depend on location and industry segment. If you are doing eg. embedded development, or primarily targeting Unix platforms, then you will see very little C# - but then if you were working mostly on Windows develeopment you'd think C and C++ were mostly dead...
Just be careful when you compare US and UK miles per gallon. UK gallons are about 20 percent larger than US gallons. A car that does 50 mpg with US gallons would do about 60 mpg with British gallons
You maybe need to do some more research - the car referred to is probably the Ford Fiesta EcoNetic. It gets 65mpg _US_, which is 76+mpg UK.
Oh, and it isn't a hybrid - just ordinary diesel. It isn't the only one either, Mini Cooper D, VW Polo Bluemotion etc. have similar numbers.
Not contradictory at all. The D in DHTML is for dynamic, not scripting. Plenty of dynamic things you can do with CSS alone, such as display (or not), hide/unhide etc. - and dynamic based on user actions (:active:hover:focus).
It isn't unusually efficent for a modern european car.
VW Polo Bluemotion is similar (and has been around for a while). VW will have a new Golf in 2009 with the BlueMotion version aiming for similar mpg to the current Polo.
The latest Mini Cooper D is also 60+ US mpg (72+ imperial).
Your 65mpg imperial would be the same as a Prius, which doesn't even make it into the top ten for economy these days (in europe at least).
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> He asked a VERY legitimate question. In fact, it is one that I am surprised that has not be done so far.
This has been done plenty of times before - just probably not on /. because it isn't really a free/open-source thing to do.
I have licensed several commercial products from other parties with full source and modifcation rights before - but I would regard all the cases as being "commercial / proprietary" software vendors, rather than anywhere near the FOSS world.
If the number of customers is small I would suggest you will probably want a proper contract rather than relying on copyright / EULA. As has been said, ask a lawyer to draw one up. That sort of arrangement is really very common in the commercial software world, plenty of corporate lawyers should be capable of handling it.
If you are looking at wide distribution and really want to rely solely on EULA / copyright, then there are cases where this has been done before that would be worth looking at. One example I can think of is that Microsoft used to ship (way before the "shared source" rubbish) the MFC libraries as modifiable, and in fact re-distributable, (with conditions on your version being renamed to avoid clashes etc.). Might be worth a look at their old licences (or the current ones even - I'm not sure if they still ship MFC as modifiable though). Also in the MS world, Dundas (dundas.com) have shipped commercial grid and chart controls for years with full source code - might be worth loking at their licenses.
> If the FSF continue to push that line then we start to move toward the territory of trying to copyright facts about interfaces which after the SCO fiasco most in the free software community might be wary of?
This can of worms has been opened many times before, long ago, and indeed has upset people in the community.
eg. from 1993:
Quoted from http://groups.google.co.uk/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/c77a27c6303b49a4?hl=en.
And, yes, I think you will find that that is _the_ Alan Cox.
GPL or GPL-compatible doesn't change the argument - you are still saying there is a requirement to license your code to comply with a third party license - GPL. Otherwise why is GPL compatibility necessary at all ?
In the case of a GCC plugin that third party would be the FSF, and its license the GPL. The only (copyright related) reason you would have to be compliant with the GPL would be in order to be licensed under the GPL - because you have no licence otherwise. So, in the case of the GPL, saying you comply with the license is the same as saying you have license.
Or in other words, I don't see the difference in this context between being required to state, for example:
"this plugin is distributed under a license from SEGA" (among other licenses)
and
"this plugin is distributed under license A which is compatible with the GPL, in order to comply with license for GCC, which is distributed under license (GPL) from the FSF"
In both cases you are being required to state that you have (= comply with, in GPL case, see above) a third party license.
In SEGA vs. Accolade it was ruled that if you have to effectively make that statement beacuse it is the only way to make your code compatible with the host environment, it is permissible to lie.
> Asking for a honest representation of your own license is a lot different than asking for a string that represents you have a license from a third party.
I'm not sure how it is different.
Since the arguement was that your code needed to be GPL to satisfy the GPL (on the other, third-party, code), your representation that your own license is GPL is representing compliance with a third party license. Since the GPL grants license only on condition of compliance, by representing that you are in compliance you are therefore representing that "you have a license from a third party".
> The point being that by default, Office 2007 saves in the new 2007 format.
This is easily configurable, moreover you can configure it once for all your users using group policy.
> If you use Office 2000, and someone sends you a 2003 or 2007 file, you're forced to upgrade.
No, Office (if patched up to date) will helpfully offer you a plugin download that will enable your _current_ version of Office to read the new file - it doesn't upgrade the whole of office, just an additional file format plugin.
> DOCX is vastly different from the DOC file format.
I think the point the GP was making is that the underlying format structure is the same - one is a binary dump of the document objects, the other is a simple XML dump. The documentation on the xml format can actually help understanding the older binary format.
The fact that it is an XML dump of the old format (based on the internal office data structures) rather than designed as an XML representation was/is a common and major criticism of OOXML.
> Yep... I suppose that's the problem with most current technology (software). No forwards compatibility.
Note that MS have provided plugins to make older versions of Office (back to 2000 I think) forwards compatible with the new 2007 file formats. Read and Write support. If your older version of office is patched uptodate then it will automatically recognise the new file format and offer to download and install the plugin.
> ... making certain that ALL their boats will sink
These boats are submarines. They'd be broken if they _didn't_ sink.
Sorry, but that is clearly a fail, not a fine (british) university education.
It's _pints_. Plural. Always.
The Debian people believe that distributing GPL'd code that links against a GPL-incompatible libc is a violation of the GPL (and they are probably right).
The FSF themselves distribute GPL'd code that links against GPL-incompatible libcs (including Suns) - and they have done for years (in fact decades), way before CDDL exsited, when Solaris / SunOS libcs were proprietary.
The FSF are right, "the Debian people" are wrong. If there was one thing the system libraries exception clearly covers, it is libc.
Yes, but who is "we" and what defines the enemy?
If we == "free software" and enemy == proprietary, then Apple = enemy along with MS.
If we == "good software" and enemy = crap, then...
No, you're wrong. The offer only has to be passed on with the distribution. The offer itself has to be redistributable (so the recipient can redistribute what they recieved), but nothing in the GPL obliges the distributor to distribute the offer to "everyone".
Wrong. Read it again carefully.
3(b) requires you to provide an offer that itself is redistributable to any third party. This is so that the recipient can redistribute the binary + your source offer. There is no requirement that you separately distribute the offer to "everyone".
Any recipient could post the your binary + source offer on a website for everyone to use (and you would have to honour the source offer), however if no recipient chooses to do so, "everyone" does not get the offer.
Sounds like things are the same the world over... with the key words being "minority shareholder".
Unless it's a public company (and sometimes even then) that tends to mean you have the right to get shafted (and not a lot else).
The majority (which could well be the guy you fell out with plus the one or two he bribed) can vote you down and do pretty much what they want - including selling for much less than the company is worth, or just diluting your equity to worthless. Of course, they'll be involved in whatever corporate entity benefits from the transaction - and you won't.
Oh, you might have lots of fancy contracts protecting minority shareholder rights etc. - but in the end they'll just be more worthless paper to file with the share certificates.
No no, I'm not bitter, not at all :-/
As a grad student you still have much to learn, including where people go to earn money after PhDs.
By "financial types" you probably mean quants. You might be interested to know that most (almost all) of them have mathematical PhDs (including many in physics), and before they finished them, they were the "serious researchers" you are lookin up to now.
And, yes, they use excel (amongst other things).
[In my day the scientists did in fact use Windows, or Unix (for those with bigger budgets). Linux if you want to spend your time hacking your OS and apps and never finishing your research. Mac ?!? - I think we had one in the corner for DTP, but research ? Maybe times have changed...]
If you are only a grad student you have much still to learn, including the range of places people go to actually earn money to live on after PhDs.
By "financial types" you probably mean quants. You should be aware that they pretty much universally have PhDs in maths or heavily mathematical fields (including physics). Before becoming quants they were very likely the "serious researcher"s you are looking up to now.
And, yes, they do use excel (among other tools).
The really really funny part is that if your Office (2003) installation is patched up to date it will a) recognise the new file formats and b) prompt you to download the _free_ (as in beer) plugin to read and write them.
Microsoft really bent over backwards making old versions capable of reading _and writing_ the new 2007 formats, and yet still people are paying them "250 per copy" to upgrade for no reason. I wish my customers were that dumb...
> They thought about making it bigger, but in the end decided that should be enough for anybody.
Except nobody told the dev team who went and removed the limit anyway...
[yes, it is gone, as of 2007]
Yep - that is why it was missing from my list :-)
Depending on which survey you read - as I said. If you follow the links I quoted it is number 3.
If you want to know which languages are in demand for real _jobs_ (whereas Tiobe seems to look at what is being discussed most on the net, at least in part) then use surveys like the one I referred you to (where C# = #3).
A quick jobs search for my local area on a major jobs site showed 43 for Java, 79 for C#, 71 for VB, 194 for SQL, and 29 for C++. Perl and Python are down in single figures. YMMV.
> Has C# truly surpassed C, C++ and Java?
No, but it is up there with them - which is what the quote said "ONE OF the most widely used..."
Where exactly it is will depend on which survey you read. Evans data reported something like 1/3 using C# I think. Or looking at current job vacancies, this site puts it third in the skills list: http://www.salaryservices.co.uk/topskills?expand=topskills&cboIndustry=-1/
Of course, YMMV and depend on location and industry segment. If you are doing eg. embedded development, or primarily targeting Unix platforms, then you will see very little C# - but then if you were working mostly on Windows develeopment you'd think C and C++ were mostly dead...
Just be careful when you compare US and UK miles per gallon. UK gallons are about 20 percent larger than US gallons. A car that does 50 mpg with US gallons would do about 60 mpg with British gallons
You maybe need to do some more research - the car referred to is probably the Ford Fiesta EcoNetic. It gets 65mpg _US_, which is 76+mpg UK.
Oh, and it isn't a hybrid - just ordinary diesel. It isn't the only one either, Mini Cooper D, VW Polo Bluemotion etc. have similar numbers.
Not contradictory at all. The D in DHTML is for dynamic, not scripting. Plenty of dynamic things you can do with CSS alone, such as display (or not), hide/unhide etc. - and dynamic based on user actions (:active :hover :focus).
It's 65 US (76+ imperial).
It isn't unusually efficent for a modern european car.
VW Polo Bluemotion is similar (and has been around for a while).
VW will have a new Golf in 2009 with the BlueMotion version aiming for similar mpg to the current Polo.
The latest Mini Cooper D is also 60+ US mpg (72+ imperial).
Your 65mpg imperial would be the same as a Prius, which doesn't even make it into the top ten for economy these days (in europe at least).
The ATV can already boost the ISS orbit, and it is neither Russian nor American.
Wrong thread - clone wars review was about three articles back...