You can change the license on code you have written at any time. The change is not retroactive though - anyone who had a copy of your original GPL'ed code may continue to use it according to the terms of the GPL, no matter what new license you have applied to since.
W.r.t. to the patch question, I believe the only safe assumption is that the patch author wants his patch to be under the same license as the code he modified. Unless he specifies otherwise, that is.
If you want to have the option of changing the license later, you could ask patch-authors to transfer copyright for their code to you. If you ask nicely, they might even go for it - after all, they still have a copy of your original GPL'ed code which they can fork if you go proprietary all of a sudden.
This makes for a good strategy for library writers who want to share their efforts with the free software community, but want to get paid if non-free programs use their code:GPL the library, thus banning proprietary use - unless you get paid!:-)
This is not a non-issue. Email, no matter what it's content is between the sender and the recipient. Publishing private email, no matter what the content, is a violation of privacy. In fact (nit-picking, I know), I do believe that those messages were protected by copyright law, and Mindcraft just violated those poeple's copyrights. But IANAL.
Would you think me rude if I said "shut the hell up" to someone who just screamed into my ear?
Yes you'd be rude - but your rudeness would be understandable and justified.
But that's not what Mindcraft did. What they did was comperable to selecting choice bits of the scream and airing them on public radio, followed by full name, phone number and address...
As for me I am about ready to go with Debian or Mandrake Linux which is basically a fixed version of RH 6.0. I think unless RH straightens out this quality thing, they are injuring themselves as well as the rest of us by because as the foremost Linux distribution the rest of the world percieves RedHat as Linux.
I feel I should warn you - Redhat 5.2 was stable. Mandrake 5.3, which was based on 5.2 was not.
I know, because I make my own mini-distro, and burn CDs for people. I tried basing it on Mandrake 5.3 and boy did I regret it - they made alot of very silly mistakes; their modifications to the initscripts just plain didn't work, they included "updates" from RedHat that were broken, and so on. It really looked like they hadn't even tried booting their own distro! So please be careful about presending Mandrake as a "fixed" RedHat - the last one sure wasn't.
Perhaps they've gotten their act together since, but that experience with "Mandrake modifications" left me with the feeling that they were amatures...
> And 8 tons of fossil fuel a day? Like all those people would have otherwise turned off their computers. > Waiting patiently for contact,
Please keep in mind that under Real OSes (tm) idle CPU time actually does use signifigantly less power then CPU time used for computations, because the "noop" or "halt" commants repeatedly given to the CPU during the idle loops uses almost no power.
Haven't any of your overclocker friends noticed how their CPUs run colder under Linux than Windows? Thats why.
I agree. KDE is a great product, which is doing alot to make Linux (and Unix in general) more useable for many people, myself included.
It's also a wonderful thing to show off when advocating Linux. We may all know that Linux has "advanced GUIs", but the rest of the world doesn't - yet.
Now I just hope KDE 1.1.1 lets me disabled animated.GIFs in kfm.:-)
This is one of the topics Alan Cox covered in the talk he gave in Iceland last week, IIRC. In short, Linux doesn't have NFSv3 support - NFSv3 stands for "NFS done right". Commercial Unixes have this, Linux doesn't. Not sure about the *BSD family - but basically, due to the inferior design of older versions of NFS (which Linux does support) you DO want to stay away from Linux if performance matters to you.
I just thought I'd point out the similarity in your arguments to the arguments for the GNU/Linux name, and the problems some people have with calling the whole system "Linux". It's the same thing. If RedHat is stealing from Linux, as you claim, well, Linux is stealing from GNU, *BSD, XFree and all the other projects that make up a useful Linux (or RedHat) system. You can't have it both ways - if the RedHat brand is bad, then so is the "Linux brand". Think about it.
Languages only need ..
on
Java for EGCS
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... what the computer has to offer, strictly speaking, as that's all they have to work with. It's not really a question of proof, it's a question of what the hardware can handle. A teleportation feature in a programming language won't help if the hardware doesn't implement it.:-)
So yes, anything programmable can be programmed using GOTO, IF and arithamatic (or just assembly language). But just because it can be done doesn't mean it's a good idea.
The ipmasq/firewalling ideas already mentioned are very good - consider them!
I have some others that might help:
Find/write a simple script that locks down/etc/hosts.*, and create a basic set of ipfwadm/ipchains rules to block access to vulnerable ports on the box, such as 2049 and 6000.
Have the script add a listener to the Deception port (see http://www.all.net/dtk/), and use the replies from it as a marker that "this box has been secured", during your automated scans.
Of course, the user *can* change the scripts and open his box up, but at least this way he has to think about why he is doing so, and hopefully has read some thought provoking material included with the lock-down script.
In fact, if you can get all your Linux users to install versions of the DTK (see the above URL), then it will be extremely hard for crackers to zero in on new "unsecured" boxes. This would require packaging the DTK into.deb,.slp and.rpm packages (and getting permission from the author of the DTK, which is not free-for-all-use).
The basic idea behind the DTK is very appropriate in situations like yours: since you cannot be sure that everyone is secure, make sure *everyone* looks like a potential victim (even if they aren't).
The hardest trick is to get the users to install it (and other hacks you might come up with). One way to (help) ensure this is to maintain a few local distribution-mirrors, where your protection packages have been added to the default installation. Encourage people to set up Linux from the local mirror (speed! security!).
Slashdot Mirror
W.r.t. to the patch question, I believe the only safe assumption is that the patch author wants his patch to be under the same license as the code he modified. Unless he specifies otherwise, that is.
If you want to have the option of changing the license later, you could ask patch-authors to transfer copyright for their code to you. If you ask nicely, they might even go for it - after all, they still have a copy of your original GPL'ed code which they can fork if you go proprietary all of a sudden.
This makes for a good strategy for library writers who want to share their efforts with the free software community, but want to get paid if non-free programs use their code:GPL the library, thus banning proprietary use - unless you get paid! :-)
I like the GPL.
Would you think me rude if I said "shut the hell up" to someone who just screamed into my ear?
Yes you'd be rude - but your rudeness would be understandable and justified.
But that's not what Mindcraft did. What they did was comperable to selecting choice bits of the scream and airing them on public radio, followed by full name, phone number and address...
Not good.
I feel I should warn you - Redhat 5.2 was stable. Mandrake 5.3, which was based on 5.2 was not.
I know, because I make my own mini-distro, and burn CDs for people. I tried basing it on Mandrake 5.3 and boy did I regret it - they made alot of very silly mistakes; their modifications to the initscripts just plain didn't work, they included "updates" from RedHat that were broken, and so on. It really looked like they hadn't even tried booting their own distro! So please be careful about presending Mandrake as a "fixed" RedHat - the last one sure wasn't.
Perhaps they've gotten their act together since, but that experience with "Mandrake modifications" left me with the feeling that they were amatures...
> And 8 tons of fossil fuel a day? Like all those people would have otherwise turned off their computers.
:-)
> Waiting patiently for contact,
Please keep in mind that under Real OSes (tm) idle CPU
time actually does use signifigantly less power then CPU
time used for computations, because the "noop" or "halt"
commants repeatedly given to the CPU during the idle
loops uses almost no power.
Haven't any of your overclocker friends noticed how their
CPUs run colder under Linux than Windows? Thats why.
So don't run seti@home on your laptop.
I agree. KDE is a great product, which is doing alot to make Linux (and Unix in general) more useable for many people, myself included.
It's also a wonderful thing to show off when advocating Linux. We may all know that Linux has "advanced GUIs", but the rest of the world doesn't - yet.
Now I just hope KDE 1.1.1 lets me disabled animated .GIFs in kfm. :-)
Of course, people are working on fixing this...
I just thought I'd point out the similarity in your arguments to the arguments for the GNU/Linux name, and the problems some people have with calling the whole system "Linux". It's the same thing. If RedHat is stealing from Linux, as you claim, well, Linux is stealing from GNU, *BSD, XFree and all the other projects that make up a useful Linux (or RedHat) system. You can't have it both ways - if the RedHat brand is bad, then so is the "Linux brand". Think about it.
So yes, anything programmable can be programmed using GOTO, IF and arithamatic (or just assembly language). But just because it can be done doesn't mean it's a good idea.
The ipmasq/firewalling ideas already mentioned are very good - consider them!
/etc/hosts.*, and create a basic set of ipfwadm/ipchains rules to block access to vulnerable ports on the box, such as 2049 and 6000.
.deb, .slp and .rpm packages (and getting permission from the author of the DTK, which is not free-for-all-use).
I have some others that might help:
Find/write a simple script that locks down
Have the script add a listener to the Deception port (see http://www.all.net/dtk/), and use the replies from it as a marker that "this box has been secured", during your automated scans.
Of course, the user *can* change the scripts and open his box up, but at least this way he has to think about why he is doing so, and hopefully has read some thought provoking material included with the lock-down script.
In fact, if you can get all your Linux users to install versions of the DTK (see the above URL), then it will be extremely hard for crackers to zero in on new "unsecured" boxes. This would require packaging the DTK into
The basic idea behind the DTK is very appropriate in situations like yours: since you cannot be sure that everyone is secure, make sure *everyone* looks like a potential victim (even if they aren't).
The hardest trick is to get the users to install it (and other hacks you might come up with). One way to (help) ensure this is to maintain a few local distribution-mirrors, where your protection packages have been added to the default installation. Encourage people to set up Linux from the local mirror (speed! security!).
Good luck!