Note that the DoD did require the GPL when they funded the development of the GNU Ada front-end to GCC, aka GNAT, a while ago (circa 1995).
Now GNAT is of course still free software and ACT and ACT Europe are continuing the development and offer paying support services. Up to now they released sources from time to time, but it looks like the Ada front-end sources will be included soon in the CVS GCC repository, see the discussions on the GCC mailing list.
Disclaimer: I worked for ACT, but I no longer do, and at work I'm a client of ACT support services.
On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack.
Wow. "Informative" and [fact]???
Last time I checked this terrorist act was attributed to "independantistes bretons" and has nothing to do with Jose Bove. Also his McDonalds destruction was made in a near public way, nothing to do with secretive terrorists.
I do not endorse the destruction of the McDonald (who does?), but casting a "terrorist" adjective on Jose Bove is pure FUD here.
Usually french farmers put tons of tomatoes, fruits or bad smelling stuff in front of public buildings when there're not happy anyway;-).
The problem with Apple's changes to GNU C in the past has not been that they haven't made the source available under the GPL (they are obliged to do that by the license, the FSF's curious obsession with copyright assignment notwithstanding)
No, no. The GPL forces you to release sources only when you release a binary. If you modify GCC for your own use, you don't have to release your patches at all. There are many internal ports of GCC for custom processors that are not released at all, and this is fine as long as the use is only internal. You can't distribute the modified GCC binaries without the sources, that's all what the GPL says.
Of course it makes sense to release your patches to benefit from the GCC community maintenance efforts, especially if you are no a compiler vendor;-).
As for the obsession with copyright assignments it's to avoid to have to undo change if a contributor employers decides to play legal games, it already happened that is why the FSF is careful about it. --LG
IIRC ASCI red has > 9000 PPro200, so that is roughly MHz equivalent of 2000 Alpha1000, but I believe the Alpha has greater FP power per MHz than the PPro, so the result might be more powerful (others have made SpecINT comparison, but I don't believe that's what significant here). Digital Fortran compiler might be better than the Intel ones too, I don't know.
After I told them I was happy with their flawless (from my experience) customer service, but that this patent stuff was not acceptable. This was a while after RMS call for boycott. Well, it looks like they don't get it. May be they're loosing hope of making money the regular way, so they turned to they lawyers, pffff.
Dear Laurent,
Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us. Not surprisingly, we have received a variety of reactions from customers about the preliminary injunction awarded to Amazon.com in its patent infringement lawsuit against barnesandnoble.com.
Because the case is still pending, we are unable to discuss the specifics of this litigation. As a general matter, however, we agree with United States District Judge Marsha J. Pechman's ruling that "granting Amazon.com's preliminary injunction will serve the public interest" in part because "protection of intellectual property rights in innovations will foster greater competition and innovation." To that end, Amazon.com will certainly continue innovating on behalf of its customers.
Judging from some customers' e-mails, there appears to be significant confusion about the scope and nature of Amazon.com's patent. For more comprehensive information about the patent and the circumstances of the lawsuit, the full text of the federal court decisions in the case may be viewed at: http://www.mccutchen.com/are/ip/ip_001.htm
We appreciate feedback from customers about this lawsuit and other important issues concerning Amazon.com, and we carefully consider all viewpoints expressed. We hope you will continue to let us know how we can improve our service to customers.
The article mentions that reliability is an important criteria for big customers, and that Sun is known for its very reliable but expensive hardware. Even with ultra-reliable hardware, you're not likely to put all your eggs in one server (that's bad cooking;-), so you have to resort to clustering your big and expensive boxes.
But then, what is the reliability gain over slightly bigger clusters of el-cheapo hardware?
Great question Dan, I hope it'll get moderated up!
Just a slight precision, Ada has also by default *runtime* checks, in particular the holy array bound checks, which is very useful in containing buffer overflow based attacks (the bug is still here, but at worse it will become a DoS, not a huge security break).
Also, to my knowledge, C and C++ are the only common languages which allow the programmer to shoot himself with wrong array accesses, all the other language have safe arrays by default (of course the compiler then should give the option to turn them off selectively for performance).
While this is understable for C (age;-), for C++ it is more a flaw than any other thing IMHO. Just wondering how Bjarne feels about it;-).
I think it's a pretty important piece of software, I browsed the project site and saw CVS mentionned in a few places, but RC is not as a project contest item.
Getting license fees through a patent is obviously not the only way to get "some compensation" from having some bright idea in the software field. You could exploit it smartly in some freely available software, get a name in the field or even in the media, and then cash on it. Big and small corporations have huge needs for people with ideas to solve their own software problems and/or software problems of their customers.
But the main problem in my view is that software patents might make it just impossible to write any software, even of the "free" kind, at all without spending 90% of your ressources on lawyers (and the remaining 10% on software engineers). How can innovation occur when no one can code any more?
And again what does the patent system really have to offer to promote innovation in the software field where thousands of programmers are already publishing for free their source code full of innovative ideas? And I do believe they'll making great money using their talent to assemble together other people ideas with a bit of their own to provide custom services solutions to people who need them.
The FSF has lawyers, and if the given piece of code is 100% GPL, or even better part of the GNU project (with all the legal papers properly done), I would bet that the FSF will take legal action, plus probably call for other form of action.
I once talked with RMS about a company delivering emacs as their editor with some custom elisp code, and he immediately asked me to check the license on the company elisp code...
If this discussion on/. provides some insight or questions, may be someone should ask RMS to write up a web page to provide author guidance on what to do in order to give our GPL software maximum legal protection. And of course what to do when someone thinks he has seen a violation;-).
As mentionned some time ago on/., some french senators did the same, and they even meet RMS. The funny thing is that they were "conservative right" senators;-).
Also the french law proposal has been reworded based on a web discussion forum (and expert) feedback. It is on the same vein has the Brazilian text, and is setting up a mandate to look at "logiciel libre" solutions before choosing a proprietary product (you would need to get a waiver from an appropriate comittee in order to go the proprietary route). That is what I would call plain common sense in any IT decision making process, not only government;-).
Note that GNAT (the GNU Ada compiler) is used to develop a lot of critical systems. It is commercially supported and continuously improved by Ada Core Technologies (including PPC cross BTW). GNAT is free software, but support for it is not free (like it ough to be!), and this makes perfect sense in the Ada world where support for tools used to develop long lived critical applications is paramount.
BTW, the latest commercial ACT demo took place in Brest (France) and there was a highly succesful presentation of the GtkAda software (Ada binding for GTK) that some ACT employees help to develop.
ACT web site: www.gnat.com, in Europe: www.act-europe.fr
Disclaimer: I worked on GNAT a while ago, and I use GNAT with support from ACT at work.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know him, but he looks like he has things to say, so may be he'll accept the idea. Laurent
Note that the DoD did require the GPL when they funded the development of the GNU Ada front-end to GCC, aka GNAT, a while ago (circa 1995).
Now GNAT is of course still free software and ACT and ACT Europe are continuing the development and offer paying support services. Up to now they released sources from time to time, but it looks like the Ada front-end sources will be included soon in the CVS GCC repository, see the discussions on the GCC mailing list.
Disclaimer: I worked for ACT, but I no longer do, and at work I'm a client of ACT support services.
Many thanks to linux.com's cool layout!
Where's the problem?
Wow. "Informative" and [fact]???
Last time I checked this terrorist act was attributed to "independantistes bretons" and has nothing to do with Jose Bove. Also his McDonalds destruction was made in a near public way, nothing to do with secretive terrorists.
I do not endorse the destruction of the McDonald (who does?), but casting a "terrorist" adjective on Jose Bove is pure FUD here.
Usually french farmers put tons of tomatoes, fruits or bad smelling stuff in front of public buildings when there're not happy anyway ;-).
No, no. The GPL forces you to release sources only when you release a binary. If you modify GCC for your own use, you don't have to release your patches at all. There are many internal ports of GCC for custom processors that are not released at all, and this is fine as long as the use is only internal. You can't distribute the modified GCC binaries without the sources, that's all what the GPL says.
Of course it makes sense to release your patches to benefit from the GCC community maintenance efforts, especially if you are no a compiler vendor ;-).
As for the obsession with copyright assignments it's to avoid to have to undo change if a contributor employers decides to play legal games, it already happened that is why the FSF is careful about it. --LG
IIRC ASCI red has > 9000 PPro200, so that is roughly MHz equivalent of 2000 Alpha1000, but I believe the Alpha has greater FP power per MHz than the PPro, so the result might be more powerful (others have made SpecINT comparison, but I don't believe that's what significant here). Digital Fortran compiler might be better than the Intel ones too, I don't know.
--LG
The article mentions that reliability is an important criteria for big customers, and that Sun is known for its very reliable but expensive hardware. Even with ultra-reliable hardware, you're not likely to put all your eggs in one server (that's bad cooking ;-), so you have to resort to clustering your big and expensive boxes.
But then, what is the reliability gain over slightly bigger clusters of el-cheapo hardware?
I wholeheartly agree with you, C++ is far from being the best solution when you realize there is something else than C and its pointers around.
;-).
However, no question on the potential flaws of C++ made it through moderation, so of course you can conclude it's the ultimate language
Great question Dan, I hope it'll get moderated up!
;-), for C++ it is more a flaw than any other thing IMHO. Just wondering how Bjarne feels about it ;-).
Just a slight precision, Ada has also by default *runtime* checks, in particular the holy array bound checks, which is very useful in containing buffer overflow based attacks (the bug is still here, but at worse it will become a DoS, not a huge security break).
Also, to my knowledge, C and C++ are the only common languages which allow the programmer to shoot himself with wrong array accesses, all the other language have safe arrays by default (of course the compiler then should give the option to turn them off selectively for performance).
While this is understable for C (age
IIRC, one of the reason RMS started the GNU thing was because of a printer with closed specs and no API to hack upton to add useful features.
;-).
Now a decade later we have a major printer vendor with APIs and drivers out into the open on sourceforge
I think it's a pretty important piece of software, I browsed the project site and saw CVS mentionned in a few places, but RC is not as a project contest item.
Anyone with a rationale on this choice?
Has anyone made a tarball of this stuff?
What proprietary (I understand non free) software is delivered with TurboLinux?
Seems to be rising. Anyone with other numbers?
Getting license fees through a patent is obviously not the only way to get "some compensation" from having some bright idea in the software field. You could exploit it smartly in some freely available software, get a name in the field or even in the media, and then cash on it. Big and small corporations have huge needs for people with ideas to solve their own software problems and/or software problems of their customers.
But the main problem in my view is that software patents might make it just impossible to write any software, even of the "free" kind, at all without spending 90% of your ressources on lawyers (and the remaining 10% on software engineers). How can innovation occur when no one can code any more?
And again what does the patent system really have to offer to promote innovation in the software field where thousands of programmers are already publishing for free their source code full of innovative ideas? And I do believe they'll making great money using their talent to assemble together other people ideas with a bit of their own to provide custom services solutions to people who need them.
The FSF has lawyers, and if the given piece of code is 100% GPL, or even better part of the GNU project (with all the legal papers properly done), I would bet that the FSF will take legal action, plus probably call for other form of action.
/. provides some insight or questions, may be someone should ask RMS to write up a web page to provide author guidance on what to do in order to give our GPL software maximum legal protection. And of course what to do when someone thinks he has seen a violation ;-).
I once talked with RMS about a company delivering emacs as their editor with some custom elisp code, and he immediately asked me to check the license on the company elisp code...
If this discussion on
--LG
As mentionned some time ago on /., some french senators did the same, and they even meet RMS. The funny thing is that they were "conservative right" senators ;-).
;-).
Also the french law proposal has been reworded based on a web discussion forum (and expert) feedback. It is on the same vein has the Brazilian text, and is setting up a mandate to look at "logiciel libre" solutions before choosing a proprietary product (you would need to get a waiver from an appropriate comittee in order to go the proprietary route). That is what I would call plain common sense in any IT decision making process, not only government
Note that GNAT (the GNU Ada compiler) is used
to develop a lot of critical systems. It is
commercially supported and continuously improved
by Ada Core Technologies (including PPC cross BTW). GNAT is free software, but support for
it is not free (like it ough to be!), and this
makes perfect sense in the Ada world where
support for tools used to develop long lived
critical applications is paramount.
BTW, the latest commercial ACT demo took
place in Brest (France) and there was
a highly succesful presentation of the GtkAda software (Ada binding for GTK) that some ACT
employees help to develop.
ACT web site: www.gnat.com, in Europe: www.act-europe.fr
Disclaimer: I worked on GNAT a while ago, and
I use GNAT with support from ACT at work.