I think that GNU will still be a nice set of free utilities for Solaris if Linux didn't come along.
You think BSD would have just up and died if Linux didn't come along? If Linux hadn't come along, once the legal wars over BSD settled down, GNU would have taken the BSD kernel and made a GnuBSD, to which neither FreeBSD and NetBSD would have complained, or really had grounds too.
There's no central registry of things that are copyrighted
Actually, that's what the Library of Congress is for the US. Historically, you had to send a copy to the LOC to get copyright; currently, you have to if you're registering a copryight, which is required before you use the law to enforce it.
Wouldn't it have been better to put energy into a C interpreter, giving it the functions that are needed, rather than make a new language?
Perl does a lot of things that would be hard to shoehorn into C, and handles a lot of things that C programmers have to handle for themselves. Perl is vastly more than an interpreted C.
You can argue that Python or Icon or Rexx or a dozen other languages are better then Perl's nitches but you can't argue that C is better; the people who wrote Perl, the people who first used and promoted Perl, and most the people who use Perl all knew C and like it or at least understand its strengths.
If you're writing a large application I suggest you don't use a scripting language. Why don't you write it in C/C++? Works on any platform with a compiler... If you have a big app, at some point you'll notice that you need more power than Perl can provide.
You go from a high level language (like Perl) to a low level language (like C/C++) when you need speed, or you need to run it places where all the dependencies of the high level language are a burden. OTOH, high level languages let you do things easily that may be a pain to program on lower level languages (like regexs), and take care of things that you have to manually handle on lower level languages (like memory). You can add on libraries to handle the later, but a GC library won't run on "any platform with a compiler". So long as the user is happy with any limitations of your high level language (speed, possibly interpretation), then changing would be a lengthy rewrite for little win.
Let's take a simple function, one that adds n numbers.
In C, the obvious route is to pass n and the numbers to a varargs function.
In C++, the obvious route is to pass a vector (from the Standard library) to the function.
In Ada, the obvious route is to pass an array to the function.
(Or, with C++ or Ada you could use template/generic functions. Faster, but the disadvantages of C functions.)
In Lisp, the obvious route is to pass a list to the function.
Even ignoring C here, to map a vector to an array to a list takes O(n) time, wiping out any advantages to using the function. You can create a basic library with a vector/list type, and interface it to all three languages, but it will be more clumsy than native types. You end up losing some of the advantages of using each language. (This, of course, is the way that.NET works.)
OTOH, where it's worth it, everyone does use the same library. Look at GTK+; every serious programming language has bindings to it, and it's often the most popular graphic toolkit for that language. Part of what makes that possible, though, is the fact that GTK+ was written in a way that makes that possible; part of what makes it tolerable is that most of those bindings were handwritten, covering the more blatant clashes with GTK and the language. Even then, there's some stuff that can't be fixed; for example, GTKAda has a few problems that no native Ada toolkit would have.
Basic English is like a Esperanto for the real world.
Which is why there are many (~2 million) Esperanto speakers in the world, and no Basic English speakers. Ogden replaced perfectly fine words with verb + preposition, which still has to be memorized, but doesn't count in the word list. It's doubtful whether Basic English would actually be easier to learn than Esperanto. Secondly, what have you got after you're done? You've learned a stilted dialect of English, which doesn't let you read or understand real English, but will immediately label you as inferior if you actually use it. I've read lousy English from foreigners, and Basic English, and the latter was probably easier. Why waste your time - if you want to learn a language, learn it. It will take you a long long time to get it exactly right, but every step along the way will be useful.
Ted Bundy indicated that porn leads down the path of sexual crime. [...] Or do you have more knowledge about this than Ted Bundy?
Ted Bundy was frequently willing to say whatever the people who was talking to wanted to hear, especially if he thought it could delay his execution. Also, Ted Bundy was unique, and what happened to him doesn't seem to cause others to do the same thing. Ted Bundy said he couldn't understand why people wanted to kill him; if he really didn't understand that simple fact, then he didn't understand others well enough to say what would lead them to do anything. If he did understand, it's just another example of that he was willing to lie and say what would get the right reaction out of others.
I think part of the real irony of people bashing the romance between Anakin and Padme is that they are holding these characters up to a higher level than what the characters should be at in real life.
Star Wars is not a realistic movie; it's an epic movie. Romeo and Juliet doesn't have realistic characters. Do you think Romeo and Juliet would be better if we added a scene where Romeo tells his buddy: "Oh man, her she comes. I can't do this; I mean, she's a Capulet, and I'm not and what were our parents think? But, oh man, she's hot. What do I do?" Yes, if I wanted to watch that on tape, I could point a video recorder at myself; that's _exactly_ why I don't want to see it at the theater.
I prefered TPM to AOTC; I prefered to see Jar-Jar, then a whiney teenaged brat, no matter how much more realistic the latter is. Epic heros should have tragic downfalls, not whiney teenage ones.
You know what? David Brin can do; he's pretty clearly in the top 100 science fiction writers of this century. Maybe if you could write like him, you would instead of bitching about his writing.
Which is simpler: retype the message in the new document or use your mouse to copy and paste the message into the new document?
That's not a complex task, nor is your comparison fair. All major Unix text editors will let you copy and paste without a mouse. And frankly, cutting and pasting is often the wrong thing to do; #include >file< keeps your version up to date with the original. (In a non-programming context, you probably want the stockholder's report to automatically update when your accountants 'correct' the budget.)
No where does it say a paraphrase is word by word, or line by line. No one said anything about a line by line paraphrase (except you).
A restatement of a text, passage, or work, expressing the meaning of the original in another form, generally for the sake of its clearer and fuller exposition; a setting forth the signification of a text in other and ampler terms; a free translation or rendering;
Cliffnotes is not a paraphrase; it's not a "fuller exposition", nor in "ampler terms". And a paraphrase is substantially derivative and hence a copyright violation.
The two primary concerns in my mind are [...] their forking of the code base without renaming it. [...] The latter means that bug reports from Redhat users are valueless.
Since when hasn't this been true? Every distribution provides custom patches to software. Debian patches every printing program to use libpaper, even if the author would prefer to use LC_PAPER. And yes, this makes certain bug reports from Debian users worthless. That's why Debian tries to funnel all bugreports through its bug tracking system. Red Hat does the exact same thing; changing things to make it work better, and trying to handle bugreports locally.
Should GCC complain because Apple and NetBSD and Debian all apply different patches to the compiler to get to work right for them? Should they tell Apple to break their driver ABI because GCC core doesn't want to include the ugly hack in CVS, or tell them they can't call it GCC because of that small patch? This is just part of free software.
unless you actually copy the code that implements the features in the Gimp that you like, you have nothing to worry about.
In a practical sense, yes. In a theoretical sense, copyright is more complex - notice that a silent movie is a derivative of a book without even using any words from it. You could infringe on gimp's copyright if you take the data structures and algorithmic details, even if you don't take the code itself. (Basically equivelent to providing a paraphrase of a book.) Any lawyer would advise you to not look at gimp, less you accidently reproduce that type of stuff. Most programmers wouldn't care, as long as it wasn't intentional, but you might run into an Ellison (who sued over several questionable infringements.)
Unless you either can't help but copy the GIMP code
Interestingly, this is actually a defense; if the way GIMP does it is the way that any good programmer would do it, it's considered functional and isn't copyrightable. The SSH people defended themselves against a complaint by the author of GMP this way, that there's only one real way to implement optimized versions of certain operations on the X86, so of course the assembly is going to look similar.
most Open Source hackers don't have the patience to design their software
Or the knowledge - I don't remember anything in any of my compsci classes about designing software. Open Source ad-hoc design, build, and redesign and rebuild seems to have worked pretty well in some cases.
or validate it
Money, perhaps? Spending several thousand dollars for a validation kit that I can only use on my machine is quite pricy.
or write documentation, or do usability studies
Serious user documentation in the commericial world is done by writers, not programmers. You can't expect people whose skills are programming to do everything.
In this case, where the software sector has a standard definition of UML, reusing the acronyn will only spread confusion
Why? I haven't seen the Unified Modeling Language used much in the OpenSource enviroments where UML will be used, and outside those enviroments, User Mode Linux will probably have to be written out (and probably explained) to have any meaning, whether or not UML is used there or not. There's a programming language named Icon; I don't see hoards of confusion over that.
The W3C is a vendor consortium, primarily a group of big players who are trying to reduce their cost of busness by hammering out some common formats. [...] the W3C as a whole is intersted in promoting the welfare of its member companies
Who do you think makes up standards-bodies? ANSI is made up primarily of big players who pay large fees to help hammer out common formats. ISO is made up of whoever the national bodies send - i.e who ever ANSI sends. And since their jobs and positions are bought by their parent company, they are there to promote the welfare of their company, not directly the general developer community.
If only western-union didn't charge as much money for money-transfers, they could take over the paypal market.
www.bidpay.com - by Western Union - only charges $3 to send small amounts of money anywhere. I don't usually use them, but they were the only way I could get money to one Estonian seller.
Oh my, he said something negative about my precious linux, I better mod it down before anyone else reads it
When someone asks about a printer that works with Linux, they don't want to hear how Linux sucks and nobody uses Linux. It's off-topic, and usually intended to call for flames.
There are thousands of quality free (roughly speech) fonts out there,
Nope. There are thousands of fonts out there, given away for free, but most of them don't allow distribution (at least not commerical, and many not at all), most of them aren't quality (tiny character sets, low quality glyphs, no hinting or kerning at all) or are very decritive and limited use. I can count the number of open source font makers on one hand.
Re:Installation not so hard -- and not so importan
on
Libranet 2.7 Released
·
· Score: 2
I did not want X or any X applications on it, so I deselected that task. On the other hand, I did want developer stuff, so I selected that. Unfortunately, that resulted in it pulling down X and a lot of related stuff anyway. If there is supposed to be such a task division, it needs to be done well, or not at all.
I'm not sure how much better this could be done. A developers task that does not include a GUI library seems lacking; and GUI library will logically depend on X stuff.
It works fine for GNU Ada, and there's no reason it can't work for any other compiled language (its assembly support covers what at least what GCC, G++, and GNU Ada output, but he's been quick about adding this type of support.)
I've never seen a license with so much political mumbo-jumbo as the GPL. If it ever get's tested, the judge is just going to laugh at it. [...] Perhaps it's time to do a clean-room rewrite of the GPL, that makes a license that might be more apt to be held up by an actual real-life court.
Are you a lawyer? Is that a legal opinion? Because the lawyers and law professors who created the GPL and who have read through the GPL believe it solid. NeXT had the option to challenge the license on GCC, with serious commercial interest (their ObjC frontend). Their lawyers obviously told them that they couldn't win the fight, and this was a time when the FSF couldn't have called on the several companies - possibly even IBM - to help defend the GPL.
your scanner now is officially a copyright circumventing device,
Your scanner was already a copyright circumventing device; how do you think all those bootleg books get on the web? Not all copyright is sound, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that GNU will still be a nice set of free utilities for Solaris if Linux didn't come along.
You think BSD would have just up and died if Linux didn't come along? If Linux hadn't come along, once the legal wars over BSD settled down, GNU would have taken the BSD kernel and made a GnuBSD, to which neither FreeBSD and NetBSD would have complained, or really had grounds too.
There's no central registry of things that are copyrighted
Actually, that's what the Library of Congress is for the US. Historically, you had to send a copy to the LOC to get copyright; currently, you have to if you're registering a copryight, which is required before you use the law to enforce it.
Wouldn't it have been better to put energy into a C interpreter, giving it the functions that are needed, rather than make a new language?
Perl does a lot of things that would be hard to shoehorn into C, and handles a lot of things that C programmers have to handle for themselves. Perl is vastly more than an interpreted C.
You can argue that Python or Icon or Rexx or a dozen other languages are better then Perl's nitches but you can't argue that C is better; the people who wrote Perl, the people who first used and promoted Perl, and most the people who use Perl all knew C and like it or at least understand its strengths.
If you're writing a large application I suggest you don't use a scripting language. Why don't you write it in C/C++? Works on any platform with a compiler... If you have a big app, at some point you'll notice that you need more power than Perl can provide.
You go from a high level language (like Perl) to a low level language (like C/C++) when you need speed, or you need to run it places where all the dependencies of the high level language are a burden. OTOH, high level languages let you do things easily that may be a pain to program on lower level languages (like regexs), and take care of things that you have to manually handle on lower level languages (like memory). You can add on libraries to handle the later, but a GC library won't run on "any platform with a compiler". So long as the user is happy with any limitations of your high level language (speed, possibly interpretation), then changing would be a lengthy rewrite for little win.
Let's take a simple function, one that adds n numbers.
.NET works.)
In C, the obvious route is to pass n and the numbers to a varargs function.
In C++, the obvious route is to pass a vector (from the Standard library) to the function.
In Ada, the obvious route is to pass an array to the function.
(Or, with C++ or Ada you could use template/generic functions. Faster, but the disadvantages of C functions.)
In Lisp, the obvious route is to pass a list to the function.
Even ignoring C here, to map a vector to an array to a list takes O(n) time, wiping out any advantages to using the function. You can create a basic library with a vector/list type, and interface it to all three languages, but it will be more clumsy than native types. You end up losing some of the advantages of using each language. (This, of course, is the way that
OTOH, where it's worth it, everyone does use the same library. Look at GTK+; every serious programming language has bindings to it, and it's often the most popular graphic toolkit for that language. Part of what makes that possible, though, is the fact that GTK+ was written in a way that makes that possible; part of what makes it tolerable is that most of those bindings were handwritten, covering the more blatant clashes with GTK and the language. Even then, there's some stuff that can't be fixed; for example, GTKAda has a few problems that no native Ada toolkit would have.
Basic English is like a Esperanto for the real world.
Which is why there are many (~2 million) Esperanto speakers in the world, and no Basic English speakers. Ogden replaced perfectly fine words with verb + preposition, which still has to be memorized, but doesn't count in the word list. It's doubtful whether Basic English would actually be easier to learn than Esperanto. Secondly, what have you got after you're done? You've learned a stilted dialect of English, which doesn't let you read or understand real English, but will immediately label you as inferior if you actually use it. I've read lousy English from foreigners, and Basic English, and the latter was probably easier. Why waste your time - if you want to learn a language, learn it. It will take you a long long time to get it exactly right, but every step along the way will be useful.
Ted Bundy indicated that porn leads down the path of sexual crime. [...] Or do you have more knowledge about this than Ted Bundy?
Ted Bundy was frequently willing to say whatever the people who was talking to wanted to hear, especially if he thought it could delay his execution. Also, Ted Bundy was unique, and what happened to him doesn't seem to cause others to do the same thing. Ted Bundy said he couldn't understand why people wanted to kill him; if he really didn't understand that simple fact, then he didn't understand others well enough to say what would lead them to do anything. If he did understand, it's just another example of that he was willing to lie and say what would get the right reaction out of others.
I think part of the real irony of people bashing the romance between Anakin and Padme is that they are holding these characters up to a higher level than what the characters should be at in real life.
Star Wars is not a realistic movie; it's an epic movie. Romeo and Juliet doesn't have realistic characters. Do you think Romeo and Juliet would be better if we added a scene where Romeo tells his buddy: "Oh man, her she comes. I can't do this; I mean, she's a Capulet, and I'm not and what were our parents think? But, oh man, she's hot. What do I do?" Yes, if I wanted to watch that on tape, I could point a video recorder at myself; that's _exactly_ why I don't want to see it at the theater.
I prefered TPM to AOTC; I prefered to see Jar-Jar, then a whiney teenaged brat, no matter how much more realistic the latter is. Epic heros should have tragic downfalls, not whiney teenage ones.
Those who can't do, bitch.
You know what? David Brin can do; he's pretty clearly in the top 100 science fiction writers of this century. Maybe if you could write like him, you would instead of bitching about his writing.
Which is simpler: retype the message in the new document or use your mouse to copy and paste the message into the new document?
That's not a complex task, nor is your comparison fair. All major Unix text editors will let you copy and paste without a mouse. And frankly, cutting and pasting is often the wrong thing to do; #include >file< keeps your version up to date with the original. (In a non-programming context, you probably want the stockholder's report to automatically update when your accountants 'correct' the budget.)
No where does it say a paraphrase is word by word, or line by line. No one said anything about a line by line paraphrase (except you).
A restatement of a text, passage, or work, expressing the meaning of the original in another form, generally for the sake of its clearer and fuller exposition; a setting forth the signification of a text in other and ampler terms; a free translation or rendering;
Cliffnotes is not a paraphrase; it's not a "fuller exposition", nor in "ampler terms". And a paraphrase is substantially derivative and hence a copyright violation.
Actually, that is legal is it not? I mean, otherwise Cliffnotes probably wouldn't exist.
A summary is legal; a line by line paraphrase isn't.
The two primary concerns in my mind are [...] their forking of the code base without renaming it. [...] The latter means that bug reports from Redhat users are valueless.
Since when hasn't this been true? Every distribution provides custom patches to software. Debian patches every printing program to use libpaper, even if the author would prefer to use LC_PAPER. And yes, this makes certain bug reports from Debian users worthless. That's why Debian tries to funnel all bugreports through its bug tracking system. Red Hat does the exact same thing; changing things to make it work better, and trying to handle bugreports locally.
Should GCC complain because Apple and NetBSD and Debian all apply different patches to the compiler to get to work right for them? Should they tell Apple to break their driver ABI because GCC core doesn't want to include the ugly hack in CVS, or tell them they can't call it GCC because of that small patch? This is just part of free software.
unless you actually copy the code that implements the features in the Gimp that you like, you have nothing to worry about.
In a practical sense, yes. In a theoretical sense, copyright is more complex - notice that a silent movie is a derivative of a book without even using any words from it. You could infringe on gimp's copyright if you take the data structures and algorithmic details, even if you don't take the code itself. (Basically equivelent to providing a paraphrase of a book.) Any lawyer would advise you to not look at gimp, less you accidently reproduce that type of stuff. Most programmers wouldn't care, as long as it wasn't intentional, but you might run into an Ellison (who sued over several questionable infringements.)
Unless you either can't help but copy the GIMP code
Interestingly, this is actually a defense; if the way GIMP does it is the way that any good programmer would do it, it's considered functional and isn't copyrightable. The SSH people defended themselves against a complaint by the author of GMP this way, that there's only one real way to implement optimized versions of certain operations on the X86, so of course the assembly is going to look similar.
haven't seen the Unified Modeling Language used much in the OpenSource enviroments where UML will be used
In some ways, that's a pretty severe indictment of Open Source. UML is about software analysis and design.
You don't quite come out and say it, but I'm getting the impression of
OpenSource doesn't use UML.
UML is about software analysis and design.
Therefore, OpenSource doesn't do software analysis and design.
That is to say, UML is not the only way to do software analysis and design. Bertrand Meyer has thrashed UML pretty hard: So, although UML willbe successful at first, because it has the right endorsements, it will be of little use to the actual process of developing software. (Unfortunately, I can't find the article where he let loose with both barrels.)
most Open Source hackers don't have the patience to design their software
Or the knowledge - I don't remember anything in any of my compsci classes about designing software. Open Source ad-hoc design, build, and redesign and rebuild seems to have worked pretty well in some cases.
or validate it
Money, perhaps? Spending several thousand dollars for a validation kit that I can only use on my machine is quite pricy.
or write documentation, or do usability studies
Serious user documentation in the commericial world is done by writers, not programmers. You can't expect people whose skills are programming to do everything.
In this case, where the software sector has a standard definition of UML, reusing the acronyn will only spread confusion
Why? I haven't seen the Unified Modeling Language used much in the OpenSource enviroments where UML will be used, and outside those enviroments, User Mode Linux will probably have to be written out (and probably explained) to have any meaning, whether or not UML is used there or not. There's a programming language named Icon; I don't see hoards of confusion over that.
The W3C is a vendor consortium, primarily a group of big players who are trying to reduce their cost of busness by hammering out some common formats. [...] the W3C as a whole is intersted in promoting the welfare of its member companies
Who do you think makes up standards-bodies? ANSI is made up primarily of big players who pay large fees to help hammer out common formats. ISO is made up of whoever the national bodies send - i.e who ever ANSI sends. And since their jobs and positions are bought by their parent company, they are there to promote the welfare of their company, not directly the general developer community.
If only western-union didn't charge as much money for money-transfers, they could take over the paypal market.
www.bidpay.com - by Western Union - only charges $3 to send small amounts of money anywhere. I don't usually use them, but they were the only way I could get money to one Estonian seller.
How is this flamebait?
Oh my, he said something negative about my precious linux, I better mod it down before anyone else reads it
When someone asks about a printer that works with Linux, they don't want to hear how Linux sucks and nobody uses Linux. It's off-topic, and usually intended to call for flames.
There are thousands of quality free (roughly speech) fonts out there,
Nope. There are thousands of fonts out there, given away for free, but most of them don't allow distribution (at least not commerical, and many not at all), most of them aren't quality (tiny character sets, low quality glyphs, no hinting or kerning at all) or are very decritive and limited use. I can count the number of open source font makers on one hand.
With the exception of Tic-Tac-Toe and possibly this Awari game, I can't think of a single game without some factor of luck/chance in it
Checkers, Chess, Go, Reversi (=Othello(tm)), most Chess variants . . .
I did not want X or any X applications on it, so I deselected that task. On the other hand, I did want developer stuff, so I selected that. Unfortunately, that resulted in it pulling down X and a lot of related stuff anyway. If there is supposed to be such a task division, it needs to be done well, or not at all.
I'm not sure how much better this could be done. A developers task that does not include a GUI library seems lacking; and GUI library will logically depend on X stuff.
nothing for programmers in non C/C++ languages.
It works fine for GNU Ada, and there's no reason it can't work for any other compiled language (its assembly support covers what at least what GCC, G++, and GNU Ada output, but he's been quick about adding this type of support.)
I've never seen a license with so much political mumbo-jumbo as the GPL. If it ever get's tested, the judge is just going to laugh at it. [...] Perhaps it's time to do a clean-room rewrite of the GPL, that makes a license that might be more apt to be held up by an actual real-life court.
Are you a lawyer? Is that a legal opinion? Because the lawyers and law professors who created the GPL and who have read through the GPL believe it solid. NeXT had the option to challenge the license on GCC, with serious commercial interest (their ObjC frontend). Their lawyers obviously told them that they couldn't win the fight, and this was a time when the FSF couldn't have called on the several companies - possibly even IBM - to help defend the GPL.
your scanner now is officially a copyright circumventing device,
Your scanner was already a copyright circumventing device; how do you think all those bootleg books get on the web? Not all copyright is sound, you know.