"There is no end to what people will pirate(and I personally don't mind that one bit)"
So I guess that's why we see all these stories about real or imagined GPL violations, (which I wouldn't be surprised to find out were posted as the poster's XMMS plays some napster'd Britney Spears MP3.)
You can't have your cake and eat it too* folks, at least not without being hypocrites.
Consider how ASCAP and BMI collect money... They don't actually track all the songs that radio stations play, they just collect money based on statistical sampling, so that what's most popular gets most of the money. If a radio station is playing music distributed under this license, ASCAP and BMI effectively will earn money from it anyway. That doesn't seem right.
And there's nothing in there that I saw to prevent your song from appearing as background music in an advertisement for who knows what awful product. That doesn't seem right either.
I think it's a great start, but there seems like a lot of room for abuse. It seems a very BSDish license and not so much a GPLish license, despite the terms about derivative works having to be distributed under the same license.
Who wants a free copy of the "derivative work" that consists of a voiceover telling you how white your shirts can be while your song plays in the background?
"...the radio stations pay the RIAA..." I think you mean "the radio station", singular. There is pretty much only one radio station left in the US now, and its name is Clearchannel.
Well, perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but, for how much longer?
"One out of every ten radio stations across the United States broadcasts under the Clear Channel's banner and the company's approximate 1,170 stations bill a full 20% of total industry revenue. No one is bigger, better or more intense than Clear Channel Radio"
From the article: "Stock vi doesn't have mouse support, editing menus, macros, or assignable key bindings."
Hmmm. this is nitpicking, but, what about ":map"?
I seem to remember using ":map" with a fairly ancient SunOS stock vi, circa 1987 or so. I thought that was the "stock" vi, since Bill Joy wrote vi, and was at Sun from the beginning. And ":map" definitely does key bindings, and if you bind a key to something that
does a shell command, (e.g. ":r!somecommand"), that's pretty much a "macro" (whatever that is), right?
Let's see now, how many 5 1/4" floppies do I have in my closet? How can I read them without a 5 1/4" floppy drive? And what about that RLL encoded 30Mb hard disk with no working controller? And these are only 15 years old or so and already I can't read them.
Regular books are in it for the long haul.
E-anything is bound to be obsolete and inaccessible in a ridiculously short time. Well, publshers might even prefer it that way. But, for things which are to last a long time, electronic media is generall not hte way to go.
(albeit CDs seem to last a long time, and devices to play them don't seem to be disappearing.)
The relaxed rules on how many radio stations a single entity may own in a given market have, in my opinion lead to a severe decline in the quality of programming available on radio. For example, take a look at this page to see the
radio stations owned by Clearchannel Communications:
http://www.clearchannel.com/corpoffices.htm#radi o
They own a terrifying number of radio stations, and the programming quality is suffering. The stations do not have to compete in many markets because Clearchannel has an effective monopoly in many markets.
The airwaves, a public resource, are being abused by this mega-corporation.
If there were a "free music movement", similar to the "free software movement" (whatever that is), in which people made music meant to be distributed freely, nobody would wonder what possible legitimate use Napster could have.
Where is the RMS of the music world?
I think the problem might be that creating good music is just *a lot* harder than programming. (well, for *me* it is anyway.)
Concerning this sentence: "If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too?"
I don't know about that, but, and though I am not a lawyer, I do know that it is not ok to make a painting based on another's copyrighted photograph and sell the painting without permission of the owner of the copyright of the photograph. So, my guess would be if you make a sketch of the painting, the same thing applies.
Oh great, now source code patches on deja.com are going to get corrupted by some damn robot going in an inserting random URLs whenever it finds a keyword:
+ + f=open("/dev/modem", O_RDWR); +
Well, I suppose most newsgroups which are likely to have source code posted are also archived elsewhere, but still, the most convenient place to search for instance, the mailing-list "info-cvs@gnu.org" is deja.com, and that routinely has source patches posted to it.
Big surprise. Mac people don't like linux all that much and think the UI sucks.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers. Of course linux is made for developers, of course linux isn't what the typical Mac user would like.
Also, linux didn't "pop up arouund 1995", it's a rewrite of unix. Unix has been around a lot longer than any of the OSes he mentioned.
Lack of competition in Open Source? How about KDE vs. Gnome? Look at all the linux distros out there! Look at (for example) all the ICQ clients. I don't see a lack of competition. The example he cites as having no competition? Perl. Ok, what about Python? What about Tcl? What about good old/bin/sh? Give me a break.
And here's a great one:
"They're [Apple] bringing UI consistency to the 'Wild West' and making a UI a required part of the Unix experience. Old time Unix fans will find this unpleasent and even undesirable.
"undesirable" does not begin to describe how repugnant I find this idea. You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers! Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
So, Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it. If most people like computers such as the Mac, then let most people buy them. Most people can also go out and buy albums by the backstreet boys. I'll stick with my old-time unix and my old-time heavy metal.
onlinephotolab.com which, if I remember right, uses a hacked version of the gimp for backend processing of images. Last time I checked they weren't distributing their changes, (I haven't checked in a while though). They don't "distribute" the software either, they just let their customers run the software via a web interface. (Is that a distribution?) As I recall one of the major players at this company is also one of the major authors of the Gimp, so you can't really fault the guy too much, he's done more than most people ever did for "the open source movement" whatever that is.
So far, not very much, as far as I can tell. E.g. there have been a lot of patches applied (but not by OpenAvenue people) and there has not been even a development cvs release since 1.10.8, yet there are quite a lot of fixes in the tree since 1.10.8.
In 10 years, how many of the programs you write for windows today will still work?
The answer is almost certainly "zero".
why would I develop for Windows when in just a few years, all my programs will be unusable? I have a bunch of useless Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in my misspent youth. What the hell can I do with them now?
On the other hand? How old is "vi"? How old is "make"? How old is "cat"? How old is X11? How old is/bin/sh? How old is "awk"?
All of these programs are well over 10 years old and they still work, and all signs indicate they will continue to work for the forseeable future. (Well, there might be some filesystem hiccups around 2038...:)
Of course these reasons apply to any unix, not just linux.
The GPL is another reason, though if you're aking "why develop for linux? I like windows", then baby-steps are in order, and the GPL might not be the place to start.:)
A friend of mine played half-life so much he forgot that the "radioactive" warning symbol was a real symbol (that for some reason looks like a reel of magnetic tape...? ) and thought it was a "half-life" logo. We were walking around someplace, I forget where, a hospital or something, and there was one of these radioactive signs, and he says to me, "that's weird, I guess somebody really likes Half-Life." I thought he was just making a joke, but he really forgot what it meant until I reminded him.
I can imagine a Darwin award, "Idiot perishes from radiation exposure while searching for Half-Life tournament"
This reminds me of an idea, I mean a pipe-dream, I had in college for a flywheel powered bicycle. I remember those flywheel powered toy cars Tonka made. Man those things could move!. So I thought, why not put a flywheel on a bicycle and charge it up by braking, then, when it was good and charged up (making a cool jet-engine type whining noise of course) push a button and blast off like those little toy cars.
Well, not being mechanically inclined I of course dropped the idea when I figured out you needed a continuously variable transmission.
I still think it would be really cool. (specially in a place that's got a lot of hills, like S.F... Charge up on the way down, free ride on the way up.)
'Course you'd have to be careful not to end up a nominee for a Darwin award...
You know (s)he's right? There are a hell of a lot more of us (Americans) then them (English), the (American) revolutionary war was more than 200 years ago. Isn't it about time we start saying that we speak "American", and guess what, so do the English, albeit a bastardized, limey version of it! Hah!:)
Just to be clear, I'm only saying this in jest. I noticed somebody posted that a wireless device that worked only in the US wasn't much good for travel. Well, that's a US-centric view. It's great for those who are travel(l)ing to the U.S.
Seriously though, as far as language is concerned I think the internet is only the latest technology, joining radio and TV, in the massive spread of English. It appears to me languages are dying faster than they are being invented. At some point, (may be 1000s of years from now) there will be the final showdown between English and Chinese. Either that, or we'll blast ourselves back into the stone age, and and new languages will evolve in post-civilization isolation like giant tortoises on the Galapagos.
As an aside, in the "battle" between English and Chinese, on the internet at least, English has the decided advantage, (perhaps this is obvious) with it's 26 character alphabet vs. the multi-thousand character (pseudo)ideograms of Chinese.
That, and from my perspective at least, it appears that there are way more Chinese speaking people learning English, than English speaking people speaking Chinese. However, this may be just a circumstance of where I happen to live. (in the U.S.) But, I don't think so. What American high-school student is given the opportunity to learn (any kind of) Chinese? Practically none, this, despite the fact that more people of the Earth speak Chinese (of some kind) than any other language(s) of the world. Yet almost every high school offers a French course. Who speaks French? The French, the Belgians...etc. 1.2 billion people speak Chinese of some kind. Why is our educational system so arranged? Rather fortunate for all those people that speak only one language, there's a word for them, I forget, mono-...mono-something...no wait, it's "Americans" that's what they call those people.
(BTW, I'm an American) and (to be redundant) am fluent in only one natural language (not counting pig-latin:).
That was a cool game, but not too many people realized it. It had a great mix of strategy and action, not to mention cool music, I still sometimes play it (badly) on guitar.
People often strive for "ease of use" as if this is some kind of holy grail.
It has always seemed to me that there are really two goals to keep in mind when contemplating a user interface design, and these goals are not always in harmony.
Those two goals are "ease of learning" and "ease of use". The two are often confused and/or taken to be identical. They are not identical.
For example, once you learn it,/bin/sh (or Perl, or awk, or grep) are very easy to use. However, they are not easy to learn. (Compared to say, Pac-Man.)
MS Windows interface (the basics) are pretty easy to learn, but not always easy to use. This is because the very limitations that make it easy to learn can make it difficult to use. (e.g. I have to constantly take my hands off the keyboard to move the freakin' mouse. etc. etc. MS Windows as a specific example is not important, Pac-Man would do as well.)
The point is you should in general, strive for both, but it is not always possible. Sometimes ease of learning is more important, (e.g. Any applications aimed at the broadest possible audiences.)
And sometimes in the real world a UI is not so much thought out as arrived at by agglomeration of features... (is that a word? you get the drift.)
Lars is just pissed because
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
Lars is just pissed because napster wasn't around when he was a kid!:) From the Garage Inc. liner notes, I see that he subscribed to a U.K mail-order house, Bullit Records, and "He was such a loyal customer that after awhile, rather than wait for Ulrich's want lists and checks, Bullit just dispatched _everything_ -- regular shipments every couple of weeks -- and billed him for the goods." That is in 1980 or so according to the liner notes. Well, when I was a kid, I sure didn't have that kind of money.
And what about all the kids in places besides the U.S... Eastern Europe, China, etc. where the cost of a (legitimately purchaced) CD can easily exceed the wages earned in a day?
I have a hard time sympathizing. (Those damn kids can just save up their money!:), no, with Lars, I mean, of course.
But, in spite of it, I'm still a die-hard fan, I own all their CDs...I just hope I don't get sued for quoting a snippet of the liner notes.
They're both [BSD & GPL'd code] gifts, just different. You're perfectly free to ignore any GPL'ed code along with any other "white elephant" gifts you may perceive yourself to be the victim of in the course of your life.
I'm not arguing to try convince anyone that they should or should not agree with the principles behind the GPL, I just don't see how anyone can feel like they have some complaint, like they're being cheated. It's not as if anyone is being tricked into using GPL'ed code. It's clearly stated what the conditions of use are. If you don't like those condtions, that's perfectly fine, don't use it. But how can anyone complain?
Usually the people complaining are those wanting to put the code into some propriety code which they intend to distribute. That is, they want to take but not give back. The GPL is designed to stop that, whether you agree with it or not, that is (one of) its purposes. But now I'm stating the obvious...
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no end to what people will pirate(and I personally don't mind that one bit)"
So I guess that's why we see all these stories about real or imagined GPL violations, (which I wouldn't be surprised to find out were posted as the poster's XMMS plays some napster'd Britney Spears MP3.)
You can't have your cake and eat it too* folks, at least not without being hypocrites.
*unless it's a quantum cake.
And there's nothing in there that I saw to prevent your song from appearing as background music in an advertisement for who knows what awful product. That doesn't seem right either.
I think it's a great start, but there seems like a lot of room for abuse. It seems a very BSDish license and not so much a GPLish license, despite the terms about derivative works having to be distributed under the same license.
Who wants a free copy of the "derivative work" that consists of a voiceover telling you how white your shirts can be while your song plays in the background?
Well, perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but, for how much longer?
From their website:
"One out of every ten radio stations across the United States broadcasts under the Clear Channel's banner and the company's approximate 1,170 stations bill a full 20% of total industry revenue. No one is bigger, better or more intense than Clear Channel Radio"
These guys mean to take it all.
Along the same lines of Project Gutenberg, but for music, is Mutopia.
From the article: "Stock vi doesn't have mouse support, editing menus, macros, or assignable key bindings."
Hmmm. this is nitpicking, but, what about ":map"?
I seem to remember using ":map" with a fairly ancient SunOS stock vi, circa 1987 or so. I thought that was the "stock" vi, since Bill Joy wrote vi, and was at Sun from the beginning. And ":map" definitely does key bindings, and if you bind a key to something that
does a shell command, (e.g. ":r!somecommand"), that's pretty much a "macro" (whatever that is), right?
Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice.
Let's see now, how many 5 1/4" floppies do I have in my closet? How can I read them without a 5 1/4" floppy drive? And what about that RLL encoded 30Mb hard disk with no working controller? And these are only 15 years old or so and already I can't read them.
Regular books are in it for the long haul.
E-anything is bound to be obsolete and inaccessible in a ridiculously short time. Well, publshers might even prefer it that way. But, for things which are to last a long time, electronic media is generall not hte way to go.
(albeit CDs seem to last a long time, and devices to play them don't seem to be disappearing.)
The relaxed rules on how many radio stations a single entity may own in a given market have, in my opinion lead to a severe decline in the quality of programming available on radio. For example, take a look at this page to see the
i o
radio stations owned by Clearchannel Communications:
http://www.clearchannel.com/corpoffices.htm#rad
They own a terrifying number of radio stations, and the programming quality is suffering. The stations do not have to compete in many markets because Clearchannel has an effective monopoly in many markets.
The airwaves, a public resource, are being abused by this mega-corporation.
What are you going to do to fix this mess?
If there were a "free music movement", similar to the "free software movement" (whatever that is), in which people made music meant to be distributed freely, nobody would wonder what possible legitimate use Napster could have.
Where is the RMS of the music world?
I think the problem might be that creating good music is just *a lot* harder than programming. (well, for *me* it is anyway.)
Concerning this sentence: "If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too?"
I don't know about that, but, and though I am not a lawyer, I do know that it is not ok to make a painting based on another's copyrighted photograph and sell the painting without permission of the owner of the copyright of the photograph. So, my guess would be if you make a sketch of the painting, the same thing applies.
Oh great, now source code patches on deja.com are going to get corrupted by some damn robot going in an inserting random URLs whenever it finds a keyword:
+
+ f=open("/dev/modem", O_RDWR);
+
Well, I suppose most newsgroups which are likely to have source code posted are also archived elsewhere, but still, the most convenient place to search for instance, the mailing-list "info-cvs@gnu.org" is deja.com, and that routinely has source patches posted to it.
Big surprise. Mac people don't like linux all that much and think the UI sucks.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers. Of course linux is made for developers, of course linux isn't what the typical Mac user would like.
Also, linux didn't "pop up arouund 1995", it's a rewrite of unix. Unix has been around a lot longer than any of the OSes he mentioned.
Lack of competition in Open Source? How about KDE vs. Gnome? Look at all the linux distros out there! Look at (for example) all the ICQ clients.
I don't see a lack of competition. The example he cites as having no competition? Perl. Ok, what about Python? What about Tcl? What about good old
And here's a great one:
"They're [Apple] bringing UI consistency to the 'Wild West' and making a UI a required part of the Unix experience. Old time Unix fans will find this unpleasent and even undesirable.
"undesirable" does not begin to describe how repugnant I find this idea. You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers! Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
So, Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it. If most people like computers such as the Mac, then let most people buy them. Most people can also go out and buy albums by the backstreet boys. I'll stick with my old-time unix and my old-time heavy metal.
onlinephotolab.com which, if I remember right, uses a hacked version of the gimp for backend processing of images. Last time I checked they weren't distributing their changes, (I haven't checked in a while though). They don't "distribute" the software either, they just let their customers run the software via a web interface. (Is that a distribution?) As I recall one of the major players at this company is also one of the major authors of the Gimp, so you can't really fault the guy too much, he's done more than most people ever did for "the open source movement" whatever that is.
But what has OpenAvenue actually done?
So far, not very much, as far as I can tell. E.g. there have been a lot of patches applied (but not by OpenAvenue people) and there has not been even a development cvs release since 1.10.8, yet there are quite a lot of fixes in the tree since 1.10.8.
You can read info-cvs here.
In 10 years, how many of the programs you write for windows today will still work?
The answer is almost certainly "zero".
why would I develop for Windows when in just a few years, all my programs will be unusable?
I have a bunch of useless Turbo Pascal programs
I wrote in my misspent youth. What the hell can I do with them now?
On the other hand?
How old is "vi"?
How old is "make"?
How old is "cat"?
How old is X11?
How old is
How old is "awk"?
All of these programs are well over 10 years old and they still work, and all signs indicate they will continue to work for the forseeable future. (Well, there might be some filesystem hiccups around 2038...
Of course these reasons apply to any unix, not just linux.
The GPL is another reason, though if you're aking "why develop for linux? I like windows", then baby-steps are in order, and the GPL might not be the place to start.
The reasons for the big package are simple.
1) It's a lot easier for the customer to see and read the package from across the room than forcing them to have to squint at the edge of a jewel box.
2) The more shelf space you take up, the less shelf space is left for your competitors.
A friend of mine played half-life so much he forgot that the "radioactive" warning symbol was a real symbol (that for some reason looks like a reel of magnetic tape...? ) and thought it was a "half-life" logo. We were walking around someplace, I forget where, a hospital or something, and there was one of these radioactive signs, and he says to me, "that's weird, I guess somebody really likes Half-Life." I thought he was just making a joke, but he really forgot what it meant until I reminded him.
I can imagine a Darwin award, "Idiot perishes from radiation exposure while searching for Half-Life tournament"
This reminds me of an idea, I mean a pipe-dream, I had in college for a flywheel powered bicycle. I remember those flywheel powered toy cars Tonka made. Man those things could move!. So I thought, why not put a flywheel on a bicycle and charge it up by braking, then, when it was good and charged up (making a cool jet-engine type whining noise of course) push a button and blast off like those little toy cars.
Well, not being mechanically inclined I of course dropped the idea when I figured out you needed a continuously variable transmission.
I still think it would be really cool. (specially in a place that's got a lot of hills, like S.F... Charge up on the way down, free ride on the way up.)
'Course you'd have to be careful not to end up a nominee for a Darwin award...
You know (s)he's right? There are a hell of a lot more of us (Americans) then them (English), the (American) revolutionary war was more than 200 years ago. Isn't it about time we start saying that we speak "American", and guess what, so do the English, albeit a bastardized, limey version of it! Hah! :)
Just to be clear, I'm only saying this in jest. I noticed somebody posted that a wireless device that worked only in the US wasn't much good for travel. Well, that's a US-centric view. It's great for those who are travel(l)ing to the U.S.
Seriously though, as far as language is concerned I think the internet is only the latest technology, joining radio and TV, in the massive spread of English. It appears to me languages are dying faster than they are being invented. At some point, (may be 1000s of years from now) there will be the final showdown between English and Chinese. Either that, or we'll blast ourselves back into the stone age, and and new languages will evolve in post-civilization isolation like giant tortoises on the Galapagos.
As an aside, in the "battle" between English and Chinese, on the internet at least, English has the decided advantage, (perhaps this is obvious) with it's 26 character alphabet vs. the multi-thousand character (pseudo)ideograms of Chinese.
That, and from my perspective at least, it appears that there are way more Chinese speaking people learning English, than English speaking people speaking Chinese. However, this may be just a circumstance of where I happen to live. (in the U.S.) But, I don't think so. What American high-school student is given the opportunity to learn (any kind of) Chinese? Practically none, this, despite the fact that more people of the Earth speak Chinese (of some kind) than any other language(s) of the world. Yet almost every high school offers a French course. Who speaks French? The French, the Belgians...etc. 1.2 billion people speak Chinese of some kind. Why is our educational system so arranged? Rather fortunate for all those people that speak only one language, there's a word for them, I forget, mono-...mono-something...no wait, it's "Americans" that's what they call those people.
(BTW, I'm an American) and (to be redundant) am fluent in only one natural language (not counting pig-latin :).
Anybody remember Herzog Zwei on Sega Genesis?
That was a cool game, but not too many people realized it. It had a great mix of strategy and action, not to mention cool music, I still sometimes play it (badly) on guitar.
People often strive for "ease of use" as if this is some kind of holy grail.
/bin/sh (or Perl, or awk, or grep) are very easy to use. However, they are not easy to learn. (Compared to say, Pac-Man.)
It has always seemed to me that there are really two goals to keep in mind when contemplating a user interface design, and these goals are not always in harmony.
Those two goals are "ease of learning" and "ease of use". The two are often confused and/or taken to be identical. They are not identical.
For example, once you learn it,
MS Windows interface (the basics) are pretty easy to learn, but not always easy to use. This is because the very limitations that make it easy to learn can make it difficult to use. (e.g. I have to constantly take my hands off the keyboard to move the freakin' mouse. etc. etc. MS Windows as a specific example is not important, Pac-Man would do as well.)
The point is you should in general, strive for both, but it is not always possible. Sometimes ease of learning is more important, (e.g. Any applications aimed at the broadest possible audiences.)
And sometimes in the real world a UI is not so much thought out as arrived at by agglomeration of features... (is that a word? you get the drift.)
Lars is just pissed because napster wasn't around when he was a kid! :) From the Garage Inc. liner notes, I see that he subscribed to a U.K mail-order house, Bullit Records, and "He was such a loyal customer that after awhile, rather than wait for Ulrich's want lists and checks, Bullit just dispatched _everything_ -- regular shipments every couple of weeks -- and billed him for the goods." That is in 1980 or so according to the liner notes. Well, when I was a kid, I sure didn't have that kind of money.
:), no, with Lars, I mean, of course.
And what about all the kids in places besides the U.S... Eastern Europe, China, etc. where the cost of a (legitimately purchaced) CD can easily exceed the wages earned in a day?
I have a hard time sympathizing. (Those damn kids can just save up their money!
But, in spite of it, I'm still a die-hard fan, I own all their CDs...I just hope I don't get sued for quoting a snippet of the liner notes.
They're both [BSD & GPL'd code] gifts, just different. You're perfectly free to ignore any GPL'ed code along with any other "white elephant" gifts you may perceive yourself to be the victim of in the course of your life.
I'm not arguing to try convince anyone that they should or should not agree with the principles behind the GPL, I just don't see how anyone can feel like they have some complaint, like they're being cheated. It's not as if anyone is being tricked into using GPL'ed code. It's clearly stated what the conditions of use are. If you don't like those condtions, that's perfectly fine, don't use it. But how can anyone complain?
Usually the people complaining are those wanting to put the code into some propriety code which they intend to distribute. That is, they want to take but not give back. The GPL is designed to stop that, whether you agree with it or not, that is (one of) its purposes. But now I'm stating the obvious...
This is to all the posters here that don't
like the GPL and who complain incessantly about it.
How can you crybabies complain about the GPL "making your like a pain in the ass?"
If you don't like the terms of the GPL, the
solution is SIMPLE.
DON'T USE GPL'ed SOFTWARE!
"ohhh! but there's some cool GPL'ed code that
would make my life so much easier if only it
weren't GPL'ed...oh misery..."
Shut up. Too bad. If the author released it under the GPL, and you don't like that fact? Too freakin' bad.
Just quit whining and write your own code then.
You people whining about the GPL and how you don't like its "viral" provisions make me sick, you really do.
GPL'ed software is a GIFT. It may not be exactly what you wanted, but HOW CAN YOU SIT THERE AND COMPLAIN!!!! Ingrates.
(Ah, I feel much better now...)
Excellent question. onlinephotolab, might be one example of this type of thing. (It uses the Gimp as a back-end.)
If the record companies really wanted to try to
put a dent into napster, et al, I wonder why they don't just start polluting the datastream?
You download a file ostensibly containing Metallica's "Seek and Destroy", and you get instead a lecture on the evils of piracy.
Put enough noise out there and it will be too annoying for most people to use. Why hasn't this happened already, is what I'm wondering.