b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
OSL, section 2:
Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license under the Licensed Claims to make, use, sell and offer for sale Derivative Works.
So the OSL is a commercial open-source license, whereas the GPL is a free-as-in-beer open source license.
To me, this looks like a broad philosophical departure that means the two licenses are from different schools of thought and can't really be reconciled. The OSL is a move towards an Open-Source but not free-as-in-beer license. This could hurt Linux distributors.
Why is it that the producer gets to lay down price/terms and the only choice to the consumer is accept/reject?
Why is it less moral if the consumer lays down the terms and the producer has to accept/reject?
Why is it seen as wrong that consumers should have any input whatsoever (god forbid) into the price or what happens with their money?
As for your first two points, I object to copyright terms being sufficiently long that they impede new related developments while being too old to have commercial value (NeWS, for instance.)
I also object to artists being screwed. My MP3s are legit - and I had hoped that more direct dissemination (ie., downloads rather that ripping them from purchased CDs) would be more efficient, cost-effective, and hopefully cut out a few middlemen. Apparently the middlemen aren't happy. Boohoo.
What makes you think Microsoft would do that? Do they want to take over the entire industry by pretending to support standards while working to undermine them...
With total respect to the Mono team, Linux coders, please don't use C# or.NET...
I can understand to some extent that companies would be reluctant to build onto a platform where they are compelled to release their code, but the point of the GPL/LGPL is to coerce reluctant coders that source code availability is a good thing.
Bad code is still code, it can still be improved and built on, it's better than no code.
Especially as wine has become quite strong in this area I don't think vendors will *not* use wine in favour of going it alone. And as the wine APIs become more mature, the requirement for vendors to modify wine itself is reduced.
For these reasons, I think the decision not to use the LGPL is regrettable.
If a company with closed-source modifications dies, they will probably not be released, because they will make up part of the assets of the company. If this happened to large extension projects it would be detrimental to wine and the Linux community.
This is unfortunately true - despite huge gains in ease-of-use, Linux is still not ready for my grandma.
I'd like to see the contract go to Apple as well, because that's another million *nix boxes and hopefully the next generation of script kiddies will get to see the internals of a non-Microsoft OS...
My linux box has 64Mb of RAM. It uses about 15Mb of that on boot and launches XDM (so that 15Mb includes my X Server.)
NT4's overhead is roughly similar.
I think that the drawbacks of the integrated networking model is that it makes it much more difficult to incorporate new features quickly - I haven't had any issues with X performance, at least not when compared to Qt, GTK and other related toolkits.
Is *nix really about the network stuff to go in later?
I use Sol x86 in my environment here, and I'm extremely concerned about the recent events:
No free downloads anymore.
No support for IA64.
Unclear support for x86 with v9.
No precompiled OpenOffice for Solaris/Intel in 641C.
But I'm being told that Sun will support the platform for 7 years - uuhhh - is my platform dying? And if it is, can it be made available to the Open Source community sooner rather than later so that development can proceed? (Open sourcing it in 15 years won't accomplish much, sorry.)
I've downloaded this but can't get it to work right - specifically, it can connect and the client thinks everything's dandy but the server doesn't display anything - it does seem to be responding to requests, and allocating memory for graphic ops.
I'm probably doing something really stupid but if anyone has any ideas I'd appreciate them.
These things are all tacked on as afterthoughts - and imho, don't work as well as my trusty DISPLAY environment variable. Do they work? Sure. Work as well as X? That's very subjective.
Also don't you think it's mildly ironic that M$ has finally implemented this stuff, but its inherent support in X is being questioned?
You've said this in a few posts now, but I'm having trouble understanding why.
I don't think a local connection creates many performance issues. It has no significant drawbacks, with the exception that features need to be supported by both servers and clients, making changes less rapid than on Windows, OSX etc.
For the record, I'd love it if Windows or OSX networked as well as X. But they don't. We live in a networked world, and the focus now should be how to drive those networks. I don't get how saying that because Apple/M$ don't support the feature we shouldn't either. That makes no sense.
An X12/X11R7 protocol, as suggested earlier, makes sense to me (so long as I can live with X11R6 for the next few years and not junk too much hardware.) Server-side alpha blending and 32bit font support can be incorporated as extensions. With it a standard feature, apps can use it instead of building that support into toolkits everywhere. What are the drawbacks with this approach?
I think you said it yourself. X is mature. As much as it would be great to incorporate alpha-blending, there are compatibility issues to be worked through. Personally I feel that the way forward is incorporation, not replacement of X - and the place for this is by working as part of the XFree86 team. You can build an alpha-blended build whenever you want.
As far as networkability, the reason this feature isn't being used all that much is because too many computer users have grown up on that - ah - other operating system and don't know that it can/does work and that they should be using it. The idea that an app and a display are inextricably linked in some way is totally stupid. And X efficiency beats the hell out of some of the alternatives (anyone used VNC on Windows?) and it also is application specific, rather than desktop specific. I'd use X a lot more if I could get an X server on windows (anyone got XFree to work?) but in a UNIX environment this feature really rocks.
With regards to toolkits I do agree - there would be benefits if these could be brought together somewhat and incorporated at a lower level - but I would say that, as a lesstif/motif person.
Try my local mirror mirror.aarnet which still had them posted as of this post. Be warned, it's a big monolithic download...but I've got it running on Intel and it works well...
I don't think virus risks come from the OS directly, but all the scripting support (esp. networked scripting support) that people keep building into apps and enabling by default.
However, a lot of the OS restrictions you suggest are implemented on many platforms.
OS/2 with hpfs supported files with 'any number of properties' and I think ntfs would still retain that support somewhere. ntfs and ext2 allow 'security at any level' as well. As far as process-level filesystem isolation, there's GNU/Hurd.
I personally feel that the performance benefits of compilation make this nearly mandatory (as opposed to Perl especially) but networkable scripts are dangerous things. Even a javascript takes control of your PC to do some things. Why is it all necessary? I just don't get it.
Just make sure you do all the things that Linux users are good at - root passwords that are difficult to guess, leave your PCs logged off when not in use, yaddayadda. It would be very difficult to install a software keyboard logger on a secure OS.
I know this is flamebait, but I'll reply to it anyway.
It's true that an Australian court is limited in the actions it can take against US Citizens and Corporations. As you say, it will be difficult to make a case against an individual count for much more than a piece of international protest, but corporations are always at risk.
But the case needs to be examined not from a perspective of what can be logistically done, but from a perspective of what is ideally right. If a Victorian does read the published material in Victoria, the end effect of the publishing is the same as had it been physically published in Victoria. On the other hand, this has the effect of lowering all laws to 'lowest common denominator' across the international sphere. But if material were held to be published only where it was hosted, then this has the opposite effect, making the most relaxed laws possible.
I don't know which way the High Court will go, and I don't envy their decision. Maybe I'm biased as a Victorian, but I don't like to see people defamed unnecessarily. In a sense the decision will have more to do with the relative strength of US anti-defamation law than anything else - the high court would be unlikely to leave a Plaintiff with no course of action if a clear breach of Australian law exists.
No, they're probably relying on it for mass distribution to AIX and Solaris users (like this)...since it's not open source, they could put some pretty cool stuff into a/bin/login, and what better place to put it...
Didn't M$ get caught with a special backdoor in NT where it included an 'NSAKey' in the registry? I don't recall its denials being particularly persuasive, but M$ is still with us...
The trouble with this is that the hardware capable of decrypting is stored with the data itself. If you leave the key around, and your PC is networked, you have no security. If you use the key and take it with you, you are still exposed while using the key. Plus, they have the right to seize your key if you leave it lying around carelessly.
That said, hardware-based encryption may still be one of the better solutions for combatting this kind of thing.
When you're running a multitasking OS, this can't really work. Everything from disk cache flushing, paging, virtually anything could cause a percieved problem.
It doesn't matter what you do, it matters what they can credibly claim you did. That's the threat. If the FBI were to accuse me in court of having written Goner, for instance, which judge is going to believe me? Any single techno-geek can't deny an allegation if it's strongly put.
The risk here is that the FBI gain more credibility to make accusations. That's it really. That credibility is a threat in itself.
Personally I don't have much to hide, because it's all posted on websites somewhere...
Does anybody know anybody with any information about how to trace it? Now is the time for making Magic-Lantern scanners if the commercial virus protection crew are in on it...
Notwithstanding the merits of a DRMOS, isn't anybody vaguely concerned that Microsoft is trying to monopolise that field - especially when they are very unlikely to deliver it?
I mean, it has always been inevitable that the Recording industry (and the software industry) would begin to look at enforced (DMCA-style) IP-protection. What's new here is M$ claiming that it, and only it, should be capable of delivering that protection. To me, this sounds absurd, and I'm sure there must be truckloads of prior art demonstrating these concepts - NT has had process-protected memory spaces for a very long time, for instance. So do most other OSes.
At least for those of us who don't like DRM or the DMCA, M$ will not be able to deliver anything substantial...
Slashdot Mirror
Consider Commercialism:
So the OSL is a commercial open-source license, whereas the GPL is a free-as-in-beer open source license.
To me, this looks like a broad philosophical departure that means the two licenses are from different schools of thought and can't really be reconciled. The OSL is a move towards an Open-Source but not free-as-in-beer license. This could hurt Linux distributors.
IANAL, but I am a Law student ;)
- Malx
http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~malsmith
What's with all the griping about how bloated and bad apache is, then how great IIS is, and how a web server should just read and write?
Is this item being taken over by Microsoft?
Everyone, download it and try it for yourself. It's really cool.
Why is it that the producer gets to lay down price/terms and the only choice to the consumer is accept/reject? Why is it less moral if the consumer lays down the terms and the producer has to accept/reject? Why is it seen as wrong that consumers should have any input whatsoever (god forbid) into the price or what happens with their money? As for your first two points, I object to copyright terms being sufficiently long that they impede new related developments while being too old to have commercial value (NeWS, for instance.) I also object to artists being screwed. My MP3s are legit - and I had hoped that more direct dissemination (ie., downloads rather that ripping them from purchased CDs) would be more efficient, cost-effective, and hopefully cut out a few middlemen. Apparently the middlemen aren't happy. Boohoo.
What makes you think Microsoft would do that? Do they want to take over the entire industry by pretending to support standards while working to undermine them...
With total respect to the Mono team, Linux coders, please don't use C# or .NET...
I can understand to some extent that companies would be reluctant to build onto a platform where they are compelled to release their code, but the point of the GPL/LGPL is to coerce reluctant coders that source code availability is a good thing.
Bad code is still code, it can still be improved and built on, it's better than no code.
Especially as wine has become quite strong in this area I don't think vendors will *not* use wine in favour of going it alone. And as the wine APIs become more mature, the requirement for vendors to modify wine itself is reduced.
For these reasons, I think the decision not to use the LGPL is regrettable.
If a company with closed-source modifications dies, they will probably not be released, because they will make up part of the assets of the company. If this happened to large extension projects it would be detrimental to wine and the Linux community.
This is unfortunately true - despite huge gains in ease-of-use, Linux is still not ready for my grandma.
I'd like to see the contract go to Apple as well, because that's another million *nix boxes and hopefully the next generation of script kiddies will get to see the internals of a non-Microsoft OS...
It's overhead, but how much overhead?
My linux box has 64Mb of RAM. It uses about 15Mb of that on boot and launches XDM (so that 15Mb includes my X Server.)
NT4's overhead is roughly similar.
I think that the drawbacks of the integrated networking model is that it makes it much more difficult to incorporate new features quickly - I haven't had any issues with X performance, at least not when compared to Qt, GTK and other related toolkits.
Is *nix really about the network stuff to go in later?
I use Sol x86 in my environment here, and I'm extremely concerned about the recent events:
But I'm being told that Sun will support the platform for 7 years - uuhhh - is my platform dying? And if it is, can it be made available to the Open Source community sooner rather than later so that development can proceed? (Open sourcing it in 15 years won't accomplish much, sorry.)
I've downloaded this but can't get it to work right - specifically, it can connect and the client thinks everything's dandy but the server doesn't display anything - it does seem to be responding to requests, and allocating memory for graphic ops.
I'm probably doing something really stupid but if anyone has any ideas I'd appreciate them.
These things are all tacked on as afterthoughts - and imho, don't work as well as my trusty DISPLAY environment variable. Do they work? Sure. Work as well as X? That's very subjective.
Also don't you think it's mildly ironic that M$ has finally implemented this stuff, but its inherent support in X is being questioned?
You've said this in a few posts now, but I'm having trouble understanding why.
I don't think a local connection creates many performance issues. It has no significant drawbacks, with the exception that features need to be supported by both servers and clients, making changes less rapid than on Windows, OSX etc.
For the record, I'd love it if Windows or OSX networked as well as X. But they don't. We live in a networked world, and the focus now should be how to drive those networks. I don't get how saying that because Apple/M$ don't support the feature we shouldn't either. That makes no sense.
An X12/X11R7 protocol, as suggested earlier, makes sense to me (so long as I can live with X11R6 for the next few years and not junk too much hardware.) Server-side alpha blending and 32bit font support can be incorporated as extensions. With it a standard feature, apps can use it instead of building that support into toolkits everywhere. What are the drawbacks with this approach?
I think you said it yourself. X is mature. As much as it would be great to incorporate alpha-blending, there are compatibility issues to be worked through. Personally I feel that the way forward is incorporation, not replacement of X - and the place for this is by working as part of the XFree86 team. You can build an alpha-blended build whenever you want.
As far as networkability, the reason this feature isn't being used all that much is because too many computer users have grown up on that - ah - other operating system and don't know that it can/does work and that they should be using it. The idea that an app and a display are inextricably linked in some way is totally stupid. And X efficiency beats the hell out of some of the alternatives (anyone used VNC on Windows?) and it also is application specific, rather than desktop specific. I'd use X a lot more if I could get an X server on windows (anyone got XFree to work?) but in a UNIX environment this feature really rocks.
With regards to toolkits I do agree - there would be benefits if these could be brought together somewhat and incorporated at a lower level - but I would say that, as a lesstif/motif person.
Try my local mirror mirror.aarnet which still had them posted as of this post. Be warned, it's a big monolithic download...but I've got it running on Intel and it works well...
Not happy, Sun.
I don't think virus risks come from the OS directly, but all the scripting support (esp. networked scripting support) that people keep building into apps and enabling by default.
However, a lot of the OS restrictions you suggest are implemented on many platforms.
OS/2 with hpfs supported files with 'any number of properties' and I think ntfs would still retain that support somewhere. ntfs and ext2 allow 'security at any level' as well. As far as process-level filesystem isolation, there's GNU/Hurd.
I personally feel that the performance benefits of compilation make this nearly mandatory (as opposed to Perl especially) but networkable scripts are dangerous things. Even a javascript takes control of your PC to do some things. Why is it all necessary? I just don't get it.
Just make sure you do all the things that Linux users are good at - root passwords that are difficult to guess, leave your PCs logged off when not in use, yaddayadda. It would be very difficult to install a software keyboard logger on a secure OS.
Lots of interest in this topic apparently
I use CDE, and I happen to like it. I think it'd be great to see it open-sourced and available on Linux as an alternative, lightweight, integrated WM.
I'll stop now so that everybody can finish laughing at me :(
I know this is flamebait, but I'll reply to it anyway.
It's true that an Australian court is limited in the actions it can take against US Citizens and Corporations. As you say, it will be difficult to make a case against an individual count for much more than a piece of international protest, but corporations are always at risk.
But the case needs to be examined not from a perspective of what can be logistically done, but from a perspective of what is ideally right. If a Victorian does read the published material in Victoria, the end effect of the publishing is the same as had it been physically published in Victoria. On the other hand, this has the effect of lowering all laws to 'lowest common denominator' across the international sphere. But if material were held to be published only where it was hosted, then this has the opposite effect, making the most relaxed laws possible.
I don't know which way the High Court will go, and I don't envy their decision. Maybe I'm biased as a Victorian, but I don't like to see people defamed unnecessarily. In a sense the decision will have more to do with the relative strength of US anti-defamation law than anything else - the high court would be unlikely to leave a Plaintiff with no course of action if a clear breach of Australian law exists.
No, they're probably relying on it for mass distribution to AIX and Solaris users (like this)...since it's not open source, they could put some pretty cool stuff into a /bin/login, and what better place to put it...
Didn't M$ get caught with a special backdoor in NT where it included an 'NSAKey' in the registry? I don't recall its denials being particularly persuasive, but M$ is still with us...
The trouble with this is that the hardware capable of decrypting is stored with the data itself. If you leave the key around, and your PC is networked, you have no security. If you use the key and take it with you, you are still exposed while using the key. Plus, they have the right to seize your key if you leave it lying around carelessly.
That said, hardware-based encryption may still be one of the better solutions for combatting this kind of thing.
When you're running a multitasking OS, this can't really work. Everything from disk cache flushing, paging, virtually anything could cause a percieved problem.
I respectfully disagree.
It doesn't matter what you do, it matters what they can credibly claim you did. That's the threat. If the FBI were to accuse me in court of having written Goner, for instance, which judge is going to believe me? Any single techno-geek can't deny an allegation if it's strongly put.
The risk here is that the FBI gain more credibility to make accusations. That's it really. That credibility is a threat in itself.
Personally I don't have much to hide, because it's all posted on websites somewhere...
- Malx
Does anybody know anybody with any information about how to trace it? Now is the time for making Magic-Lantern scanners if the commercial virus protection crew are in on it...
- Malx
Notwithstanding the merits of a DRMOS, isn't anybody vaguely concerned that Microsoft is trying to monopolise that field - especially when they are very unlikely to deliver it?
I mean, it has always been inevitable that the Recording industry (and the software industry) would begin to look at enforced (DMCA-style) IP-protection. What's new here is M$ claiming that it, and only it, should be capable of delivering that protection. To me, this sounds absurd, and I'm sure there must be truckloads of prior art demonstrating these concepts - NT has had process-protected memory spaces for a very long time, for instance. So do most other OSes.
At least for those of us who don't like DRM or the DMCA, M$ will not be able to deliver anything substantial...
- Malcolm