If you want to read an excellent newsletter about the affect of technology on our world, our communities, and ourselves, I highly recommend Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE. It is available on the web at:
NETFUTURE addresses topics such as computers in education, the notion that technology brings us all closer together, and the belief that technology helps us to live easier lives. (I'm sure Steve would have a field day with slashdot). IMO, Steve often goes off into environmentalists fantasy land. I get the impression he thinks we would all be better off if we tossed away our tools and went back to being hunter/gatherers. Plus he incorrectly views any experience related to the natural world as somehow more "authentic" than others. Nevertheless, I consider this an excellent resource. It makes you think about technology and computers in ways that you might not have done before. It is an excellent antidote to the Negroponte's of the world.
I think you'll find NETFUTURE far more stimulating than Islands in the Clickstream. (Though to be fair, I guess I should give the IC person more time to win me over. And yes, I know that I am not detailing my criticisms).
It would be nice if the DFSG said something that required a license to be perpetual and non-cancellable. OTOH I agree with Ian Jackson who once posted to a Debian list that the DFSG were simply that: guidelines, not a legal document. The OSD should be considered similarly. Finding a loophole in the guidelines should not be grounds for branding a particular product "Open Source" or not.
BTW: "All Rights Reserved" is simply a magic phrase needed to invoke copyright protection in some Latin American countries. It does not actually mean anything wrt preserving rights under US copyright law. Actually, it is possible that today the phrase is obsolete, since all affected countries may have signed the Berne Convention.
He doesn't. Go to www.uspto.gov and search for it. You will find that it has been applied for (NOT granted) by Software in the Public Interest (SPI). Additionally, you'll note a company called Open Source Solutions with a similar REGISTERED trademark that is likely to dispute SPI's claim to "Open Source".
So "Open Source" is not yet a registered trademark or certification mark at all, much less owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) or Eric Raymond.
Of coure there is still the dispute between SPI and the OSI. I am very disappointed in SPI's failure to say anything further on this. They soliticed input from the free software community with a deadline of 12/31. However, no decision was ever put out and the community feedback was never published as they claimed it would be. I emailed them about it in late January and they said they were running a bit behind. More than a bit I would guess.
The BSD license is not a good one to use because of the advertising clause. If you wish to use a non-copyleft license, please consider the FreeBSD license instead. It removes the advertising clause.
The Artistic license supposedly has several flaws in it, and is not widely used. I haven't looked at it in detail, but you should before licensing any code under it. (This is true of any license, I suppose).
This fracturing of the market is inevitable under "open source". Companies want to exploit open source for the technical advantages it brings just like Eric Raymond is telling them too. It makes sense that they will try to do this by writing licenses that provide as little true freedom as possible in order to gain the technical benefits.
Anyone can use any licensing terms he likes for his own code. Thus if I wrote something, I could use a modified GPL that code. It would not affect the "real" GPL license on other people's code.
The problem with doing this is that your specially modified license will no longer be compatible with the ordinary GPL, thus it will not be possible for you to use code under the ordinary GPL in your project.
Bill Gates new book is published by Warner Books, which is owned by Time-Warner which is also (you guessed it) the publisher of Time magazine. Can you say "conflict of interest"? This one even made the Drudge Report...
There's a lot more than "questioning" going on with Tom. Review his posts, note his liberal use of vitriol and pejoritaves, then get back with me. There is certainly nothing wrong with questioning Stallman, but he takes it a few levels beyond that.
Go do a DejaNews search on Tom and his rants about Richard Stallman and the "GPV". For example, his "GPL Documentation == unspeakable evil" thread (he says it is a "creeping poison").
Based on his postings, I would say he is a person with a lot of hatred towards Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GPL, anything "GNU". I highly suggest that you read up on his history before supporting anything that Tom Christiansen does. You want want to help him anyway, but you should at least understand where he is coming from first.
Yes, but that does not address the question of whether or not the copyright holder can unilaterally terminate the license. It only defines bad behavior the licensee can engage in that results in termination.
Didn't the Pine developers at Wash U. try to retroactively revoke their free license when that project went proprietary? Do you know what happened with that.
... most free software licenses are silent on the issue of termination. I'm to lazy to look it up, but IIRC the GPL itself says nothing on the topic. One of the changes I would like to see is a clause stating that the license is "perpetual and non-cancellable". What would happen if someone announced they were terminating the GPL license on their code? I don't believe this has been tested in court.
I disagree with Bruce about the termination clause in the Jikes license making the software non-free. It says that if an intellectual property claims "appears likely" then blah, blah, blah. It does not say that IBM gets to decide what qualifies as likely. They could claim that, but unless it could be proven true in court, I don't think they will be successful at terminating the license. This is far from letting the license be terminated at IBM's whim.
I must say that page is singularly unenlightening about what their "new" direction is and how it differs from the old. Thus how could anyone pick a name to match it? The only thing I can get out of this annoucement is that they don't want to be associated with "GNU" anymore.
The code they are contributing will be free software. The goal is to produce a test suite for a 100% compatible Java implementation. If someone wants to extend this suite to test their own Java language extensions, that is fine with me. Isn't this what free software is all about?
ESR is not an ultra-rightist
on
RMS vs. ESR
·
· Score: 1
Whether you would describe them as "right wing" or not, Eric Raymond has very extremist political views. He supports the abolition of government, among other things.
MIT birthplace of hackerdom?
on
RMS vs. ESR
·
· Score: 1
Raymond said, "important strains of it [free software] (such as the BSD Unix tradition) predated him [RMS] and remain both technically and ideologically independent of his Free Software Foundation." (emphasis added)
MIT birthplace of hackerdom?
on
RMS vs. ESR
·
· Score: 1
I think you'd have difficulty finding a place with free software traditions that both pre-dated MIT, and which continue to have an effect today. Other schools certainly made contributions to the culture, but MIT is generally considered the most prominent. The traditions of Stanford and CMU (for example) are also reasonably close to those of MIT as far as I can tell. (Though I'm no expert here).
Whatever the history, it is certain that AT&T and Berkeley were not the birthplace of free software in any way, shape, or form. And it is completely false to say that BSD pre-dates Stallman, which Eric Raymond did.
This article is a repeat. But I'm glad Taco brought up the Big Lie repeated in this article, namely that AT&T/Berkeley represents the true origins of free software. I first saw this stated by Eric Raymond in a Salon article sometime back. It is wrong and needs to be corrected before people start believing it.
I'm reposting my message on this from the previous thread here:
This article repeats the Big Lie (one that I've seen Raymond repeat, BTW) that somehow the free software movement pre-dates Richard Stallman. Stallman gets a lot of his legitimacy from having started the FSF back in 1983, and from his claims that he represents the original free software philosophy. I see these (false) statements about how free software is somehow pre-Stallman as nothing more than a blatant, explicit attempt by Stallman's critics to de-ligitimize his views by re-writing history so that he no longer represents the origins of free software. The people propagating this want to substitute in the Berkeley traditions as the origin of free software because those are much more friendly to the proprietary software developers these people are sucking up to.
Facts:
-- Stallman started at the MIT AI Lab in 1971, long before BSD. [ The first version of Unix was written in 1970 but was never released. ]
-- The MIT AI Lab is widely recognized as the birthplace of hackerdom and the earliest free software traditions. This dates back to the 60's and even the 50's TMRC at MIT. Stallman is a direct heir to and participant in these earliest of traditions. The AI lab traditions pre-date Unix.
-- The original "Emacs commune" license pre-dates the UCB license. (The Emacs commune license was an early form of copyleft). Actually, I can't swear that this is accurate, but I believe that it is. (Stallman wrote the original Emacs in 1975, which was before the first BSD release I believe (I think that was 79 or something)).
The first version of Unix was written in 1970 after the collapse of the Multics project in 1969. The first BSD release was in 1979, though obviously it was probably in development before that.
There is no technical reason to insist on full compliance with the OSD, only a philosophical one. When people claim that they want open source code for purely technical reasons, it therefore should have been obvious that the OSD would soon be watered down.
The Sun "Community Source License" shows the flaws of Open Source. From a pure technical perspective, there is no reason why this license isn't free enough to give all the purported technical benefits of open development. So if that is your criteria for choosing a development/licensing model, how do you justify insisting on a license that is fully OSD compliant?
Look for more of this as businesses try to exploit the technical benefits of open development without giving their users true freedom.
This article repeats the Big Lie (one that I've seen Raymond repeat, BTW) that somehow the free software movement pre-dates Richard Stallman. Stallman gets a lot of his legitimacy from having started the FSF back in 1983, and from his claims that he represents the original free software philosophy. I see these (false) statements about how free software is somehow pre-Stallman as nothing more than a blatant, explicit attempt by Stallman's critics to de-ligitimize his views by re-writing history so that he no longer represents the origins of free software. The people propagating this want to substitute in the Berkeley traditions as the origin of free software because those are much more friendly to the proprietary software developers these people are sucking up to.
Facts:
-- Stallman started at the MIT AI Lab in 1971, long before BSD.
-- The MIT AI Lab is widely recognized as the birthplace of hackerdom and the earliest free software traditions. This dates back to the 60's and even the 50's TMRC at MIT. Stallman is a direct heir to and participant in these earliest of traditions. The AI lab traditions pre-date Unix.
-- The original "Emacs commune" license pre-dates the UCB license. (The Emacs commune license was an early form of copyleft). Actually, I can't swear that this is accurate, but I believe that it is. (Stallman wrote the original Emacs in 1975, which was before the first BSD releases I believe).
I don't think the article accurately portrayed Richard Stallman's distinction between commerical and proprietary software. Selling free software and running a business are just fine with him. It is only proprietary software he does not like.
Slashdot Mirror
My head hurts from reading that.
If you want to read an excellent newsletter about the affect of technology on our world, our communities, and ourselves, I highly recommend Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE. It is available on the web at:
http://www.ora.com/peop le/staff/stevet/netfuture/index.html
NETFUTURE addresses topics such as computers in education, the notion that technology brings us all closer together, and the belief that technology helps us to live easier lives. (I'm sure Steve would have a field day with slashdot). IMO, Steve often goes off into environmentalists fantasy land. I get the impression he thinks we would all be better off if we tossed away our tools and went back to being hunter/gatherers. Plus he incorrectly views any experience related to the natural world as somehow more "authentic" than others. Nevertheless, I consider this an excellent resource. It makes you think about technology and computers in ways that you might not have done before. It is an excellent antidote to the Negroponte's of the world.
I think you'll find NETFUTURE far more stimulating than Islands in the Clickstream. (Though to be fair, I guess I should give the IC person more time to win me over. And yes, I know that I am not detailing my criticisms).
It would be nice if the DFSG said something that required a license to be perpetual and non-cancellable. OTOH I agree with Ian Jackson who once posted to a Debian list that the DFSG were simply that: guidelines, not a legal document. The OSD should be considered similarly. Finding a loophole in the guidelines should not be grounds for branding a particular product "Open Source" or not.
BTW: "All Rights Reserved" is simply a magic phrase needed to invoke copyright protection in some Latin American countries. It does not actually mean anything wrt preserving rights under US copyright law. Actually, it is possible that today the phrase is obsolete, since all affected countries may have signed the Berne Convention.
He doesn't. Go to www.uspto.gov and search for it. You will find that it has been applied for (NOT granted) by Software in the Public Interest (SPI). Additionally, you'll note a company called Open Source Solutions with a similar REGISTERED trademark that is likely to dispute SPI's claim to "Open Source".
So "Open Source" is not yet a registered trademark or certification mark at all, much less owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) or Eric Raymond.
Of coure there is still the dispute between SPI and the OSI. I am very disappointed in SPI's failure to say anything further on this. They soliticed input from the free software community with a deadline of 12/31. However, no decision was ever put out and the community feedback was never published as they claimed it would be. I emailed them about it in late January and they said they were running a bit behind. More than a bit I would guess.
The BSD license is not a good one to use because of the advertising clause. If you wish to use a non-copyleft license, please consider the FreeBSD license instead. It removes the advertising clause.
The Artistic license supposedly has several flaws in it, and is not widely used. I haven't looked at it in detail, but you should before licensing any code under it. (This is true of any license, I suppose).
This fracturing of the market is inevitable under "open source". Companies want to exploit open source for the technical advantages it brings just like Eric Raymond is telling them too. It makes sense that they will try to do this by writing licenses that provide as little true freedom as possible in order to gain the technical benefits.
Anyone can use any licensing terms he likes for his own code. Thus if I wrote something, I could use a modified GPL that code. It would not affect the "real" GPL license on other people's code.
The problem with doing this is that your specially modified license will no longer be compatible with the ordinary GPL, thus it will not be possible for you to use code under the ordinary GPL in your project.
Bill Gates new book is published by Warner Books, which is owned by Time-Warner which is also (you guessed it) the publisher of Time magazine. Can you say "conflict of interest"? This one even made the Drudge Report...
What's not true? I didn't say anything about the Perl documentation.
There's a lot more than "questioning" going on with Tom. Review his posts, note his liberal use of vitriol and pejoritaves, then get back with me. There is certainly nothing wrong with questioning Stallman, but he takes it a few levels beyond that.
Is that you, Tom? John?
Go do a DejaNews search on Tom and his rants about Richard Stallman and the "GPV". For example, his "GPL Documentation == unspeakable evil" thread (he says it is a "creeping poison").
Based on his postings, I would say he is a person with a lot of hatred towards Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GPL, anything "GNU". I highly suggest that you read up on his history before supporting anything that Tom Christiansen does. You want want to help him anyway, but you should at least understand where he is coming from first.
Yes, but that does not address the question of whether or not the copyright holder can unilaterally terminate the license. It only defines bad behavior the licensee can engage in that results in termination.
Didn't the Pine developers at Wash U. try to retroactively revoke their free license when that project went proprietary? Do you know what happened with that.
... most free software licenses are silent on the issue of termination. I'm to lazy to look it up, but IIRC the GPL itself says nothing on the topic. One of the changes I would like to see is a clause stating that the license is "perpetual and non-cancellable". What would happen if someone announced they were terminating the GPL license on their code? I don't believe this has been tested in court.
I disagree with Bruce about the termination clause in the Jikes license making the software non-free. It says that if an intellectual property claims "appears likely" then blah, blah, blah. It does not say that IBM gets to decide what qualifies as likely. They could claim that, but unless it could be proven true in court, I don't think they will be successful at terminating the license. This is far from letting the license be terminated at IBM's whim.
I must say that page is singularly unenlightening about what their "new" direction is and how it differs from the old. Thus how could anyone pick a name to match it? The only thing I can get out of this annoucement is that they don't want to be associated with "GNU" anymore.
The code they are contributing will be free software. The goal is to produce a test suite for a 100% compatible Java implementation. If someone wants to extend this suite to test their own Java language extensions, that is fine with me. Isn't this what free software is all about?
The National Review (a conservative political magazine) ran an article entitled Apocalypse Gore which provides an interesting take on him.
I also suggest that you check out How to tell the difference
between Al Gore and the Unabomber.
Whether you would describe them as "right wing" or not, Eric Raymond has very extremist political views. He supports the abolition of government, among other things.
Raymond said, "important strains of it [free software] (such as the BSD Unix tradition) predated him [RMS] and remain both technically and ideologically independent of his Free Software Foundation." (emphasis added)
See:
http://www.salonm agazine.com/21st/feature/1998/09/11feature2.html.
I think you'd have difficulty finding a place with free software traditions that both pre-dated MIT, and which continue to have an effect today. Other schools certainly made contributions to the culture, but MIT is generally considered the most prominent. The traditions of Stanford and CMU (for example) are also reasonably close to those of MIT as far as I can tell. (Though I'm no expert here).
Whatever the history, it is certain that AT&T and Berkeley were not the birthplace of free software in any way, shape, or form. And it is completely false to say that BSD pre-dates Stallman, which Eric Raymond did.
This article is a repeat. But I'm glad Taco brought up the Big Lie repeated in this article, namely that AT&T/Berkeley represents the true origins of free software. I first saw this stated by Eric Raymond in a Salon article sometime back. It is wrong and needs to be corrected before people start believing it.
I'm reposting my message on this from the previous thread here:
This article repeats the Big Lie (one that I've seen Raymond repeat, BTW) that somehow the free software movement pre-dates Richard Stallman. Stallman gets a lot of his legitimacy from having started the FSF back in 1983, and from his claims that he represents the original free software philosophy. I see these (false) statements about how free software is somehow pre-Stallman as nothing more than a blatant, explicit attempt by Stallman's critics to de-ligitimize his views by re-writing history so that he no longer represents the origins of free software. The people propagating this want to substitute in the Berkeley traditions as the origin of free software because those are much more friendly to the proprietary software developers these people are sucking up to.
Facts:
-- Stallman started at the MIT AI Lab in 1971, long before BSD. [ The first version of Unix was written in 1970 but was never released. ]
-- The MIT AI Lab is widely recognized as the birthplace of hackerdom and the earliest free software traditions. This dates back to the 60's and even the 50's TMRC at MIT. Stallman is a direct heir to and participant in these earliest of traditions. The AI lab traditions pre-date Unix.
-- The original "Emacs commune" license pre-dates the UCB license. (The Emacs commune license was an early form of copyleft). Actually, I can't swear that this is accurate, but I believe that it is. (Stallman wrote the original Emacs in 1975, which was before the first BSD release I believe (I think that was 79 or something)).
The first version of Unix was written in 1970 after the collapse of the Multics project in 1969. The first BSD release was in 1979, though obviously it was probably in development before that.
There is no technical reason to insist on full compliance with the OSD, only a philosophical one. When people claim that they want open source code for purely technical reasons, it therefore should have been obvious that the OSD would soon be watered down.
The Sun "Community Source License" shows the flaws of Open Source. From a pure technical perspective, there is no reason why this license isn't free enough to give all the purported technical benefits of open development. So if that is your criteria for choosing a development/licensing model, how do you justify insisting on a license that is fully OSD compliant?
Look for more of this as businesses try to exploit the technical benefits of open development without giving their users true freedom.
This article repeats the Big Lie (one that I've seen Raymond repeat, BTW) that somehow the free software movement pre-dates Richard Stallman. Stallman gets a lot of his legitimacy from having started the FSF back in 1983, and from his claims that he represents the original free software philosophy. I see these (false) statements about how free software is somehow pre-Stallman as nothing more than a blatant, explicit attempt by Stallman's critics to de-ligitimize his views by re-writing history so that he no longer represents the origins of free software. The people propagating this want to substitute in the Berkeley traditions as the origin of free software because those are much more friendly to the proprietary software developers these people are sucking up to.
Facts:
-- Stallman started at the MIT AI Lab in 1971, long before BSD.
-- The MIT AI Lab is widely recognized as the birthplace of hackerdom and the earliest free software traditions. This dates back to the 60's and even the 50's TMRC at MIT. Stallman is a direct heir to and participant in these earliest of traditions. The AI lab traditions pre-date Unix.
-- The original "Emacs commune" license pre-dates the UCB license. (The Emacs commune license was an early form of copyleft). Actually, I can't swear that this is accurate, but I believe that it is. (Stallman wrote the original Emacs in 1975, which was before the first BSD releases I believe).
I don't think the article accurately portrayed Richard Stallman's distinction between commerical and proprietary software. Selling free software and running a business are just fine with him. It is only proprietary software he does not like.