I recently tried to use other mail/news clients that don't make people look funny at you, but quite frankly, they all sucked in comparison, and I switched back. Even without the fancy configuration options, I could not find one that was as usable for reading a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups. I could not find one where I can easily sort mailing lists and newsgroups from various servers into subfolders by topic, or where I can set up the default spellchecking language per group, or easily create scoring rules globally or per topic/group, let alone fix up the mess people create with Outlook Express so that I can actually read them without getting a headache. Actually, it is hard to find programms that let you treat mailing lists and newsgroups and other similar things (like slashdot, which Gnus supports) in the same way - as if I would care about the transport method used! Some programms have some of the features I want, but not one of them had them all.
This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway:-)
Even KDE 1 looked a lot more like Windows than like CDE, at least by default (screenshots). Their goal might have been replacing CDE, but obviously not by emulating its look and feel (unsurprisingly, because the look and feel is one of the things many people dislike about CDE). XFce is pretty CDE-like, but a lot younger than KDE AFAIK.
How would using BSD code be "not playing nicely"? The whole point of the BSD license is to enable others to use the code, KAME being used by Linux (or Windows or whoever would find a use for it) would be a success for the project.
It might be an instance of Linux developers failing to produce software that is as good or better than the BSD-licensed alternative (and I don't know either KAME nor FreeS/Wan good enough to say if that's the case), but there is nothing morally wrong about it. Using the best tools available, whereever they come from, is certainly more important than a pissing match between FLOSS sub-communities.
RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself (of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
Spam and worms are not the problem IMHO, they are trivial to handle. Trolls you have anywhere, and they can be dealt with easily as well. The benefits of a fair mode of multi-way communication far outweight these annoyances. It is a general trend to view web-based services as inherently better than other, often older, internet services which is common at least since the start of september - take web forums vs. usenet for example, the web stuff tends to have tons of useless gizmos but be less usable for the actual task, communication. And it shows in the quality of the discussions taking place.
It is a little like the difference between the model of democracy where issues were discussed on the market place of Athens between all citizens (not that many inhabitants of Athens counted as citizens, but that is a different issue...) and the one where the citizens get to vote for a representative every few years. RSS is the TV of online communication.
True, he cannot simply revoke the license (but maybe there are ways to do so - I don't know american copyright enough, other systems do allow that), but he can choose not to license a new release to them. SCO never had a license for the new Nmap version, and nothing in the world can force him to grant them one. He is not himself bound by the GPL (otherwise dual-licensing like the Qt and MySQL models wouldn't work).
This of course assumes that he is the sole copyright holder and never incorporated any patches that were licensed to him under the GPL or other terms that would forbid such discrimination. Also, it seems that SCO could just have someone else create a work derived of Nmap and grant them a license on that, using the terms of the GPL.
Yes, I think you are wrong. The "this license" phrase you have to accept is not the text in the COPYING file, i.e. the GPL Version 2.0 as such, it is the individual contract between the copyright holder and you as a user/redistributor.
If they don't get their act together, then their are the BSDs
They would have to choose their BSD carefully though, because some (Free- and Net- most prominently) happen to be democratic, and this is obviously not acceptable for Free software projects.
Try reading the subject of the post you reply to. JWZ != ESR.
Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE.
on
FreeBSD 5.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Completely offtopic question: Do you have any idea how many people actually use your service? Are there any plans to make it an "official" offering of the FreeBSD project?
Thanks for offering it, by the way. It is both technically interesting and good to have (even if I personally don't use it).
This will update your sources from your preferred mirror (it can also check which one is currently the fastest), build a new kernel (plus modules) using your local configuration and install it, backing up the old one.
But yeah, FreeBSD is way to hard to use in comparison to Linux.
Be carefull with that. COME FROM is obviously a subset of Aspect-Oriented Programming (change program flow without original code knowing about it), which is patented by Xerox. Using INTERCAL could expose you to nasty lawsuites.
Do you have any particular reason for being so sure, or do you just want to badmouth Sun? There are already lots of JVMs, some of them open source (but outdated/incomplete), and I never heard about any patent issues.
1. Tomorrow, Sun might decide to charge for a JVM. Then you will be screwed.
Or you can use another JVM instead and live happily ever after.
2. They might decide to drop Java, closing all future to all your beautiful programs.
Even if they would use their Java trademark to enforce that no other JVM would be able to use that name when they decide to stop the JCP and development of the Sun JVM, people could just call the other implementations something else, use existing programms with that, and create a new process to further the development of the language.
3. What if Sun decide not to support your favorite platform? (Say BeOS, or Linux on PS/2, or HP48SX...)
Then you use an alternative JVM that does support it, or if there isn't any, port one of them yourself. Which is even possible with the Sun JVM - this is exactly what the FreeBSD Java project did.
Sun has copyrights on one of many JVMs, which is closed source, and they control the name "Java" by holding the trademark. This is all, and this is not enough to effectively control the use of the language, even if they wanted to screw customers.
No, the Enlightenment one does too much. The patent application is about a preview, since you can actually move windows around in the E pager, it is something completely different...
MySQL 5 will be the first version to include stored procedures, according to MySQL AB. It is hardly 3 three old, and everyone using a release labeled "Preview" on the vendors homepage "in production" must be insane or have taken the clichee that MySQL users don't care much about their data too serious.
My observation of the BSD-bases OSes suggests that this is a strawman. They
all are forks from the same, obviously BSD-licensed, source base, and while
it is unlikely that they will at some point merge back into one, there is
a whole lot of code sharing. Obviously there is between Free/Net/OpenBSD,
Darwin and the other smaller projects (ekkoBSD, DragonFly BSD etc), but
also Apple and BSDi did contribute back (not everything, but this is obviously
not a problem for any party involved).
Actually, even the characterization as "American/European" is problematic.
The (continental) european copyright systems (german "urheberrecht", french
"droit d'auteur") are significantly different. A lot of things in common
licenses or related contracts can be only roughly translated, for example
"assignment of copyright" as such is a completely foreign concept in these
systems, the rights are basically unalienable. It is more about the right
to control that your work is not used for purposes you don't agree with
than the right to profit off it (of course, both schemes have both aspects,
but the focus differs).
The annoying thing if the licenses were incompatible would be that one of
the major reasons to develop the ASL2 was to make them compatible. This
isn't really a case of the right to choose your license IMHO - the
Apache guys actually want to allow users to redistribute derived
works under the GPL. If the ASL2 would be GPL-incompatible (and only a
court could tell), there basically would be no winner, nobody wants this.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh - you use pine because it is "emacsy"? How about using one of the various Emacs-based mailers?
I recently tried to use other mail/news clients that don't make people look funny at you, but quite frankly, they all sucked in comparison, and I switched back. Even without the fancy configuration options, I could not find one that was as usable for reading a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups. I could not find one where I can easily sort mailing lists and newsgroups from various servers into subfolders by topic, or where I can set up the default spellchecking language per group, or easily create scoring rules globally or per topic/group, let alone fix up the mess people create with Outlook Express so that I can actually read them without getting a headache. Actually, it is hard to find programms that let you treat mailing lists and newsgroups and other similar things (like slashdot, which Gnus supports) in the same way - as if I would care about the transport method used! Some programms have some of the features I want, but not one of them had them all.
This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway :-)
Even KDE 1 looked a lot more like Windows than like CDE, at least by default (screenshots). Their goal might have been replacing CDE, but obviously not by emulating its look and feel (unsurprisingly, because the look and feel is one of the things many people dislike about CDE). XFce is pretty CDE-like, but a lot younger than KDE AFAIK.
Both are part of the Gnome Office metaproject, and use (optionally, in the case of AbiWord) Gnome libraries, not just plain glib and Gtk.
Which doesn't mean that this name, as well as many other K*-names, doesn't look stupid for many german native speakers.
People could say the same about metallica albums or steamboat willie.
It might be an instance of Linux developers failing to produce software that is as good or better than the BSD-licensed alternative (and I don't know either KAME nor FreeS/Wan good enough to say if that's the case), but there is nothing morally wrong about it. Using the best tools available, whereever they come from, is certainly more important than a pissing match between FLOSS sub-communities.
RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself (of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
Spam and worms are not the problem IMHO, they are trivial to handle. Trolls you have anywhere, and they can be dealt with easily as well. The benefits of a fair mode of multi-way communication far outweight these annoyances. It is a general trend to view web-based services as inherently better than other, often older, internet services which is common at least since the start of september - take web forums vs. usenet for example, the web stuff tends to have tons of useless gizmos but be less usable for the actual task, communication. And it shows in the quality of the discussions taking place.
It is a little like the difference between the model of democracy where issues were discussed on the market place of Athens between all citizens (not that many inhabitants of Athens counted as citizens, but that is a different issue...) and the one where the citizens get to vote for a representative every few years. RSS is the TV of online communication.
This of course assumes that he is the sole copyright holder and never incorporated any patches that were licensed to him under the GPL or other terms that would forbid such discrimination. Also, it seems that SCO could just have someone else create a work derived of Nmap and grant them a license on that, using the terms of the GPL.
But why would violating their license to redistribute Linux have any impact on their license to redistribute Nmap?
Yes, I think you are wrong. The "this license" phrase you have to accept is not the text in the COPYING file, i.e. the GPL Version 2.0 as such, it is the individual contract between the copyright holder and you as a user/redistributor.
Try reading the subject of the post you reply to. JWZ != ESR.
Thanks for offering it, by the way. It is both technically interesting and good to have (even if I personally don't use it).
But yeah, FreeBSD is way to hard to use in comparison to Linux.
Be carefull with that. COME FROM is obviously a subset of Aspect-Oriented Programming (change program flow without original code knowing about it), which is patented by Xerox. Using INTERCAL could expose you to nasty lawsuites.
Do you have any particular reason for being so sure, or do you just want to badmouth Sun? There are already lots of JVMs, some of them open source (but outdated/incomplete), and I never heard about any patent issues.
Sun has copyrights on one of many JVMs, which is closed source, and they control the name "Java" by holding the trademark. This is all, and this is not enough to effectively control the use of the language, even if they wanted to screw customers.
(Then again, I didn't RTFA)
Somehow I have a hard time imagining Xerox, who have patented programming methodologies like AOP, as the good guys in a patent case...
My observation of the BSD-bases OSes suggests that this is a strawman. They all are forks from the same, obviously BSD-licensed, source base, and while it is unlikely that they will at some point merge back into one, there is a whole lot of code sharing. Obviously there is between Free/Net/OpenBSD, Darwin and the other smaller projects (ekkoBSD, DragonFly BSD etc), but also Apple and BSDi did contribute back (not everything, but this is obviously not a problem for any party involved).
Actually, even the characterization as "American/European" is problematic. The (continental) european copyright systems (german "urheberrecht", french "droit d'auteur") are significantly different. A lot of things in common licenses or related contracts can be only roughly translated, for example "assignment of copyright" as such is a completely foreign concept in these systems, the rights are basically unalienable. It is more about the right to control that your work is not used for purposes you don't agree with than the right to profit off it (of course, both schemes have both aspects, but the focus differs).
The annoying thing if the licenses were incompatible would be that one of the major reasons to develop the ASL2 was to make them compatible. This isn't really a case of the right to choose your license IMHO - the Apache guys actually want to allow users to redistribute derived works under the GPL. If the ASL2 would be GPL-incompatible (and only a court could tell), there basically would be no winner, nobody wants this.