Face it, main stream primary, middle, and high school education is nothing for us - your only chance is that a clever math or science teacher protects you somewhat because he or she recognises the technical talent. Its a pity that it gets worse in the schools, but on the other hand, the net makes it easier for todays kids to find out that there are many more geeks. It gets better at university, as the lecturers themselves are often geeks. Chilli
Did you ever consider that the GPL is actually better for businesses than weaker licenses such as BSD? Take Red Hat as an example. Other companies can copy their distro and sell it, but Red Hat knows for sure that nobody will, e.g., improve their installer and distribute it without giving all the changes back to Red Hat. By building a brand recognition Red Hat can make a lot of money although other companies can sell the same code. If other companies (in particular those with more money) could use an embrace and extend strategy, I wouldn't be sure how long Red Hat could survive.
I don't see an problems with the PROPRIETARY RIGHTS section. The important point of the GPL when compared to public domain software is that the authors do not give up their copyright. They keep it, but grant everybody who receives the software the well-known freedoms. This is what GNU calls copyleft - copyright, but used the other way around.
This mechanism is very important to be able to legally ensure that nobody misuses GPLed code.
Transmeta seems to be a geek company. Not only do they employ our beloved Linus, they also run their Web server on Linux and have secret messages hidden in their HTML source. The Web page is also rather plain, not overstyled, and the source is clean HTML.
I was not only talking about Unicode. If the idea is to have one distribution for all locales, you must be able to switch the language used by all programs for their messages - you may use Unicode to encode these messages, but most users want to see all messages in exactly one language and want to customise that language. The second problem is that localisation is not only a question of characters, there are other parameters that have to be switched, eg, the local currency and whether real numbers use . or , for seperating the fractional part.
BTW, Owen Taylor is currently working at a Unicode infrastructure for GTK+, which will eventually make Gnome Unicode-based. But as I said that is only the foundation for a m18n distribution.
Have a look at October Gnome to see how a single system can easily switch between various languages including Japanese. If you are using graphical login, you can select your language of choice on login. It will get even better with the GScript engine currently developed in Gnome. The same technology could definitely be used during installation.
So, a nice mulilingual GUI is not the problem. What is much more difficult to fix is all the old, basic infrastructure, eg, grep, sed, gtroff, etc. It is an incredible amount of work to rewrite the text processing in all these tools. The second problem is that languages like Japanese require complicated input systems (kanji henkan server) for which (a) we don't have really good free implementations yet and (b) we need better support from X (there is XIM and it mostly sucks for Japanese).
Shouldn't the point of "free" software to be getting more software out there for end users? Provide fewer restrictions on their choices?
No, that is not the point. The point is to lift the restrictions on what a user can do with the software. It is not a matter of getting as much software as possible, but being able to share and modify the software that exists.
If your free code is used in a proprietary program, it is freedom for the developer not for the user. The freedom of sharing and modifying the resultant program is taken away from the user; something that is impossible if the code would have been GPLed.
``He who writes the code chooses the licence'' (with apologies to all female readers) is true, but the GPL gives the power to the users. It takes power from the developer and gives it to the user.
It is of secondary importance how this case will eventually end in 200X and it is not important what the penalty for M$ is if they are found guilty. The really important point for the free software community is that they are constrained in their moves and that their shares suffer a little.
After these findings, M$ will be even more careful in how offensive they act against competion. Furthermore, loss of share value and one more dent in their image will make their words (including their FUD) sound less important and people will be easier convinced to switch to competing products.
We should use this for us and until the final ruling, with a bit of luck, M$ is no monopoly anymore.
Stig makes some powerful and interesting arguments, beginning with an undeniable truth: GPL is more limiting on individual choice as to what can be done with a work than, say, dedication of a work to the public domain.
While it is undoubtedly true that there may be good reasons for the GPL limitations (and there are), it is undeniable that there are limits, and in this sense, GPL software is less "free" than public domain or BSD licensing.
You are talking about a different freedom than RMS. RMS is talking about the freedom of users, whereas you are talking about the freedom of developers. The GPL maximises the freedom of users. The BSD license, on the other hand, maximises the freedom of developers. The BSD license allows developers to restrict the freedom of users, the GPL doesn't. So from the users point of view (and that's RMS' view), the GPL is better at protecting freedom.
Chilli
PS: Realising that all of us use more software than they develop, I agree with RMS that maximising the freedom of users is more important than maximising the freedom of developers.
PPS: This is exactly like a good politician should maximise the freedom of the people and not the freedom of politicians.
There are already many free software "components" available. They are usually called libraries, which doesn't sound as nice as components, I admit. The article, for example, mentions all sorts of abstract data structures, which are, for example, already provided by GLib. There are also libraries for dealing with image formats (imlib comes to mind) and there are networking libraries. IMHO, the free software community was so far very effective at producing libraries for all sorts of problems.
So, what's the point of the proposed repository? I guess, it wouldn't be very useful to implement the functionality that we already have all over again. What would really be needed is a site that makes it easy (especially for less experienced programmers) to find the library (or component, if you insist) that they need.
A search on freshmeat isn't terribly effective if you do not already have a rather clear picture of what you are looking for. In other words, it would be helpful to provide an index that makes it easy to find the functionality that you need. The index could then for example point to the freshmeat entry of a selected software component. Organising such an index in such a way that it is easy to navigate is definitely a challenge, but it would probably also be very helpful.
When I buy a Sun, I want the hardware and in some cases the Solaris kernel. For example, I don't want their crappy tar, so they can ship GNU tar as well.
Second what is more disgusting with Sun selling GNU tools than with RedHat selling GNU tools?
All marketing. They would have to admit that free software is better than their closed products and they would have to start the free software discussion with their more conservative customers.
They of course hide this behind arguments of liability etc, but I think, it in the end it boils down to the above.
But mostly I've found that Solaris users who dump on Intel Solaris are either just blind Sparc bigots, or formulated their opinion on an ancient version of Intel Solaris when it really was a terrible product.
[...] Just don't use IDE disks with it and expect to use a third-party X server, if you need an X server.
It may not have occured to you that most Intel PCs use IDE disks and that most people need an X server - both of which is no problem with Linux and *BSD. This means that for most of the hardware and most of the people Intel/Solaris is a bad deal.
Chilli
PS: Sure you can buy an extra X server, but (1) I would expect that to be included and (2) I have personally had bad experiences with Xi's servers (on two different chip sets).
So, is this good or bad for the free OSes? One would think that direct sales can easier adapt to a new paradigm and inrastructure, simply because less people are involved whom you have to convince/retrain.
Given the discussion that people who keep a habit of learning all through their lifes are still mentally agile when old, an interesting connection is the constantly increasing demand for life long learning. Especially in high tech jobs, nobody can expect that the knowledge that is sufficient today will still be sufficient in 20 or 30 years; this is probably most extreme in the IT industry.
Does this imply that more and more old people will be mentally fit? Given the problem of the dramatically increasing average age in most industry nations, we should probably hope for this effect.
Chilli
PS: Maybe most smart old people will in the end be computer geeks, because they were forced to keep learning;-)
You're right of course, but there is also empirical evidence that the usage pattern of the brain has a strong influence on how much the mental facilities weaken over time. For example, one experiment showed that by using video games, the weakening of eye-hand coordination and reaction speed of old people could be slowed down. (So, Quake can actually be useful;-)
The mentioned research could help finding explanations for these phenomena and improve our knowledge of how to counter the weakening of mental facilities. Mental exercise is probably always good.
Don't forget that tools that they can only use internally are not of very high benefit in this case. Some comments said that you can buy source code licenses of WinCE. If they give a GPLed tool to one of their partners, they automatically have to pass on its source code and the right for distribution under the GPL.
GPLed code doesn't like to be confined - it's used to being free.
Given that/. is supposed to be read by technology savy smarts, the math in some comments is really stunning. If they sell a box for $29.95 and give $1 (or more) to the FSF, what does that tell us about the fraction of their profit that they are giving to the FSF? Exactly nothing, because we don't know the cost. And the costs are not only the costs for burning the CD, but also compiling the CD, paying somebody to design the box, and so on.
Now, Red Hat could have done what most companies do when they donate part of their profit: They could have said, we donate 50% of our profit, but that doesn't tell you anything. Why? How about reading the Funding section in gcc's info documentation:
To make this approach work, you must insist on numbers that you can compare, such as, "We will donate ten dollars to the Frobnitz project for each disk sold." Don't be satisfied with a vague promise, such as "A portion of the profits are donated," since it doesn't give a basis for comparison.
Even a precise fraction "of the profits from this disk" is not very meaningful, since creative accounting and unrelated business decisions can greatly alter what fraction of the sales price counts as profit. If the price you pay is $50, ten percent of the profit is probably less than a dollar; it might be a few cents, or nothing at all.
So, all Red Hat is doing is following a suggestion by the FSF. Next time, before you complain, RTFM.
It is of course possible to argue whether the name of the distribution is good or not, but the point here is to increase public awareness concerning the importance of RMS's and the FSF's contribution - that's the main argument of RMS when insisting on the name GNU/Linux if I understand him correctly. It emphasis Red Hat's commitment to strive not only for open, but for free software.
Of course they are a company, so they have to make compromises, but to date, they contributed every line of code back to the community under the GPL - that's what ultimately counts. How many lines did you contribute?
PPS: I actually learned one more thing: Red Hat's store is rather US/Canada centric, but maybe they sell enough stuff there, so that they don't care about the rest of the planet...
I set out to buy a RH6.1 from them and clicked on the package of the box on the front page and then on one of the buy buttons on the next page. Now, this selects a US/Canada version and on check out, the system complained that it can't send a US/Canada version to Japan, because of the $%#% export restrictions.
So, I started searching for an international version, which made me click on the small "Red Hat Linux" hyperlink on the left of the menu bar on top of the https://store.redhat.com/commerce/ page and (voila!) I had found my intl. version...and then, the "RMS Linux" link on the button of that page caught my attention:-)
You wanted to know...
Chilli
PS: And what do we learn from this? Stupid export restrictions, can be useful;-)
Forgetting for a moment all constructed arguments about the relative benefits of the various licenses, let's look at this from an experimental angle. Which license is used by the operating system that fuels most OS-related IPOs at the moment?
Do I hear GPL? So what does that tell us? It tells me that I don't care about all this license theory as long as it doesn't explain any interesting observations.
In this context, `treibend' cannot be translated as `floating' (was that BabelFish's idea;-) A literal translation would be `pushing', but that completely looses the connotation that I had in mind - that's the reason, I didn't attempt to translate it.
I am not sure whether you can really say, it is a colloquialism in German, but it definitely bears an association with a certain type of music.
Strange Days is a great film with a superb soundtrack, indeed.
Anyway, it's true - the best coding sessions are with music that let's the thoughts fly through the abstraction levels and the fingers over the keyboard. I personally prefer fast and often relatively hard stuff. Some of my current favourites are
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, main stream primary, middle, and high school education is nothing for us - your only chance is that a clever math or science teacher protects you somewhat because he or she recognises the technical talent. Its a pity that it gets worse in the schools, but on the other hand, the net makes it easier for todays kids to find out that there are many more geeks. It gets better at university, as the lecturers themselves are often geeks. Chilli
Chilli
This mechanism is very important to be able to legally ensure that nobody misuses GPLed code.
Chilli
Chilli
BTW, Owen Taylor is currently working at a Unicode infrastructure for GTK+, which will eventually make Gnome Unicode-based. But as I said that is only the foundation for a m18n distribution.
Chilli
Chilli
So, a nice mulilingual GUI is not the problem. What is much more difficult to fix is all the old, basic infrastructure, eg, grep, sed, gtroff, etc. It is an incredible amount of work to rewrite the text processing in all these tools. The second problem is that languages like Japanese require complicated input systems (kanji henkan server) for which (a) we don't have really good free implementations yet and (b) we need better support from X (there is XIM and it mostly sucks for Japanese).
Chilli
If your free code is used in a proprietary program, it is freedom for the developer not for the user. The freedom of sharing and modifying the resultant program is taken away from the user; something that is impossible if the code would have been GPLed.
``He who writes the code chooses the licence'' (with apologies to all female readers) is true, but the GPL gives the power to the users. It takes power from the developer and gives it to the user.
Chilli
After these findings, M$ will be even more careful in how offensive they act against competion. Furthermore, loss of share value and one more dent in their image will make their words (including their FUD) sound less important and people will be easier convinced to switch to competing products.
We should use this for us and until the final ruling, with a bit of luck, M$ is no monopoly anymore.
Chilli
You are talking about a different freedom than RMS. RMS is talking about the freedom of users, whereas you are talking about the freedom of developers. The GPL maximises the freedom of users. The BSD license, on the other hand, maximises the freedom of developers. The BSD license allows developers to restrict the freedom of users, the GPL doesn't. So from the users point of view (and that's RMS' view), the GPL is better at protecting freedom.
Chilli
PS: Realising that all of us use more software than they develop, I agree with RMS that maximising the freedom of users is more important than maximising the freedom of developers.
PPS: This is exactly like a good politician should maximise the freedom of the people and not the freedom of politicians.
So, what's the point of the proposed repository? I guess, it wouldn't be very useful to implement the functionality that we already have all over again. What would really be needed is a site that makes it easy (especially for less experienced programmers) to find the library (or component, if you insist) that they need.
A search on freshmeat isn't terribly effective if you do not already have a rather clear picture of what you are looking for. In other words, it would be helpful to provide an index that makes it easy to find the functionality that you need. The index could then for example point to the freshmeat entry of a selected software component. Organising such an index in such a way that it is easy to navigate is definitely a challenge, but it would probably also be very helpful.
Chilli
Chilli
Second what is more disgusting with Sun selling GNU tools than with RedHat selling GNU tools?
Chilli
They of course hide this behind arguments of liability etc, but I think, it in the end it boils down to the above.
Chilli
It may not have occured to you that most Intel PCs use IDE disks and that most people need an X server - both of which is no problem with Linux and *BSD. This means that for most of the hardware and most of the people Intel/Solaris is a bad deal.
Chilli
PS: Sure you can buy an extra X server, but (1) I would expect that to be included and (2) I have personally had bad experiences with Xi's servers (on two different chip sets).
Chilli
Does this imply that more and more old people will be mentally fit? Given the problem of the dramatically increasing average age in most industry nations, we should probably hope for this effect.
Chilli
PS: Maybe most smart old people will in the end be computer geeks, because they were forced to keep learning ;-)
The mentioned research could help finding explanations for these phenomena and improve our knowledge of how to counter the weakening of mental facilities. Mental exercise is probably always good.
Chilli
GPLed code doesn't like to be confined - it's used to being free.
Chilli
Now, Red Hat could have done what most companies do when they donate part of their profit: They could have said, we donate 50% of our profit, but that doesn't tell you anything. Why? How about reading the Funding section in gcc's info documentation:
So, all Red Hat is doing is following a suggestion by the FSF. Next time, before you complain, RTFM.It is of course possible to argue whether the name of the distribution is good or not, but the point here is to increase public awareness concerning the importance of RMS's and the FSF's contribution - that's the main argument of RMS when insisting on the name GNU/Linux if I understand him correctly. It emphasis Red Hat's commitment to strive not only for open, but for free software.
Of course they are a company, so they have to make compromises, but to date, they contributed every line of code back to the community under the GPL - that's what ultimately counts. How many lines did you contribute?
Chilli
PPS: I actually learned one more thing: Red Hat's store is rather US/Canada centric, but maybe they sell enough stuff there, so that they don't care about the rest of the planet...
I set out to buy a RH6.1 from them and clicked on the package of the box on the front page and then on one of the buy buttons on the next page. Now, this selects a US/Canada version and on check out, the system complained that it can't send a US/Canada version to Japan, because of the $%#% export restrictions.
So, I started searching for an international version, which made me click on the small "Red Hat Linux" hyperlink on the left of the menu bar on top of the https://store.redhat.com/commerce/ page and (voila!) I had found my intl. version...and then, the "RMS Linux" link on the button of that page caught my attention :-)
You wanted to know...
Chilli
PS: And what do we learn from this? Stupid export restrictions, can be useful ;-)
Do I hear GPL? So what does that tell us? It tells me that I don't care about all this license theory as long as it doesn't explain any interesting observations.
Chilli
I am not sure whether you can really say, it is a colloquialism in German, but it definitely bears an association with a certain type of music.
Strange Days is a great film with a superb soundtrack, indeed.
Chilli
Anyway, it's true - the best coding sessions are with music that let's the thoughts fly through the abstraction levels and the fingers over the keyboard. I personally prefer fast and often relatively hard stuff. Some of my current favourites are
- Carter USM
- garbage
- Trainspotting soundtrack
- Strange Days soundtrack
- Deine Lakaien (that's on at the moment
:-) - Yellow Monkey (a Japanese band with great lyrics)
- Pulp
Techno can also be cool.Chilli