Re:Good idea, but glibc first would make more sens
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Debian FreeBSD Distro?
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· Score: 2
And programs under one BSD aren't promised to work on ALL BSD's..
And programs under one Linux-based operating system aren't promised to work under all Linuxes. Which is good, as any such promise would forfeit all semblance of credibility in the promiser. Such active or passive prevarication does help distinguish the competent from the ignorant or mendacious, but to discern between those two classes, further interrogation will prove necessary.
Why don't all programs built for one Linux-based operating system work for another one? For myriads of reasons, including hardware version, kernel versions, operating system versions, adminstrative strategies, and user environment. I have numerous such examples, as do we all.
Don't you need to see people smile, stare at chicks, see random people walking in the street, and partake of the occasional piece of female flesh?
The number of unsustainable assumptions in this innocent but puerile posting could fill more than a few term papers. I'm embarrassed even to have read it.
Why is it harder to carry out a conversation via email than it is face to face? [...] Email and other web-based communication techniques that rely on the written word rather than the spoken word can only communicate a minority of the contextual information that a human being typically expects to receive during a conversation.
Everything you just said is true.
But I think there's something critical that you failed to mention. You're talking about a conversation that's time delayed. When I send someone mail, even if they read and respond right away, there's still a significant latency between the time that I was composing my note and when I eventually read their response. This time lag can easily stretch into days--sometimes even longer.
Despite the readily observable fact that most electronic communications are written as though they were quick post-it notes, at least in the case of those media which are not interactive in real time, our written words often have a lot more to do than they would in a simple post-it note. They need to make up for the missing context.
Back when folks actually sent each other letters in the post, a very different sort of communication occurred. This is particularly evident in those letters that went overseas, or which were composed before we had our mail delivered by high-speed aircraft. In these circumstances, a great deal more care was put into careful drafting and composition. The greater the latency in delivery, the more context would be provided, the more care taken.
Today when you send mail via the computer, you find that unlike the many famous collected letters of our forefathers, our own written notes no longer use what one would call "written English". In the vast majority of cases, communications via electronic media are treated with a level of informality that was previously found only on post cards and notes stuck on the front of the fridge or computer terminal. In other words, most of us employ "spoken English" in our daily electronic exchanges.
But as you yourself noted, there's a grave problem here. The amount of context provided is nothing like what you would get in a face-to-face, real-time conversation. It doesn't even compare favorably with the environment of a telephone conversation, in which you can at least perceive the intonation and stress patterns of the other party's voice.
The art of writing letters, and, all too often it seems today, the very art of writing itself, have faded into historical obscurity leaving us an impoverished shell of sound bytes and surface banter. As disturbing as the effect itself is the realization that this has happened to us without even our being aware of what we were losing.
Once you recognize that written and spoken English are, in some senses, different languages, you can start to analyse their respective advantages and disadvantages. Clearly spoken English is more spontaneous than written English. But the written form enjoys a far richer potential because of its capacity to hold and convey more nuance and detail from the writer to his reader. And it's not actually as much harder as you might initially fear. That's because no one requires you to type the same words that youd' use in a quick pub chat. In a written medium, you are free to choose your words more carefully, to play games with word order, and to compose sentences of a richer syntactic pattern than most of are comfortable doing in in a spoken medium. And you can clean up your mistakes, too.
There is much to be said for adopting a considered hand in all but the most ephemeral of written exchanges. There is no question that this requires more time, more effort. It's also true that in some contexts, such increased levels of care and attention are largely unwarranted. And it must be recognized that what one would consider writing using "written English" is hardly a skill that comes naturally to everyone, and that we must not discourage those who have a hard time with using written English from contributing their unique voices to the collective discourse.
That being said, if there is one thing I would dearly like to see is for our children to rediscover the enchantment of the written word. They must be challenged to read as much as they can. Of no less importance is their commensurate need to write as much they can, too. Literacy has plummeted in the United States over the last few decades from a place of honor in the world rankings to one of considerable shame. I do not pretend to understand all the causes, but a principal component to the solution is both simple and clear: more reading, more writing.
I do not know that the increased penetration of the Internet has necessarily helped this situation of our society's loss of the written word. I see scant little written English being written today in our on-line mail and news exchanges, nor in any other forum you care to name, this one included. Then again, I don't intend to blame the net for this, either. Our newspapers are written at a fifth-grade level; our weekly news magazines in America are little improved beyond that. It would not surprise me to learn that the majority of Americans would probably find not merely Scientific American but even The Economist too complex in word choice and syntactic structure for their diminished capabilities.
Do our children even recognize the written world they could be participating in on-line? I don't know. Probably they relegate that world of writing to their grammar schools. But the better they can write and the better they can organize their ideas and thoughts and then convey these to others, the better they will do later in life, largely irrespective of which particular career they land in. Communication skills help everywhere.
Why, after all, do you think that liberal arts majors are in such high demand these days? Not a small part of it is from their generalist training and their ability to communicate well, It is an area that the stereotypical geek is often not at his best, but it doesn't have to be.
So next time you jot out a piece of mail, especially if it's something that really matters to you, remember that the person on the other end isn't right there in the same room watching you, nor are they on phone listening to you, either. Consider the context they'll be losing, and try to make up for this loss by the quality of you writing.
And whatever you do, please read over your message twice before actually sending it. Remember: what you write once wil by others be read a million times, especially in this particlar forum.:-) Look for bugs, redundancies, inconsistencies, and awkward constructs in your prose just as you might look for these infelicities in your source code. People will be tacitly thankful you did. Best of all, you'll stand a much better change of getting your point across--which is, after all, why you're bothering to type something in the first place.
"There is some good news. My shampoo and remarkably small stick of $14 deodorant just arrived by courier. By now, I'm not that interested in having a shower and I've grown to like my odour. It's kind of fruity."
By the way, the German weekly SPIEGEL magazine did a similar experiment where one of their authors spent a week trying to use the new German Pay TV network.
Is this some subtly iconoclastic commentary regarding the unexpectedly similar personal hygiene standards between Europeans and North Americans?:-)
It *does* replace human contact. I haven't left my room for days and I'm OK. The voices are quieter now, and only talk in perl....
Tell me about it.:-) I've got like a foot and a half of snow piled up outside my door, and the pasta is running out. Fortunately, we should be unthawed in a day or so. It's either communicate online, or talk to my cat. Unfortunately, my cat doesn't speak perl, so you're the lucky guys.:-)
I need more intrusive technology. I need to interrupt someone's day with some questions. Now.
That sounds pretty funny, until it happens to you. My friends and I have always used talk(1) for this kind of infrequent emergency, oh since something like back in 1984 or so. I at least haven't been tempted to use ytalk(1) for ages, but it's there if I really want it.
These days such calls are a lot less frequent an occurrence. I bet it doesn't happen more than once or thrice a month. This works out well, because we never know where each other really is geographically, so a phone call wouldn't work anyway. It's all nice and real-time. It probably helps that we all type at about 80 words per minute, or better. (And no, I don't know what that is in metric.:-)
Snarf-and-barf is what you do with your mouse. Single, double, or triple-clicking with the index button (NOT THE RIGHT BUTTON, DAMN IT) gets you character, word, or line. Clicking with the ring button (NOT THE LEFT BUTTON, DAMN IT) extends the snarfing. And clicking the middle button barfs your snarfed data back into wherever your mouse is aimed.
That's snarf-and-barf.
As you see, this "left" and "right" terminology is completely wrong. Last time I looked at KDE, it kept telling me to use left button and right button, despite the fact that this was completely wrong. You see, I always execute xmodmap -e 'pointer = 3 2 1', which takes care of that. But the stupid messages don't track this. That's highly stupid. You can either fix it to track this correctly, or you can stop using messages that discrimate against someone's manual orientation, as I have attempted to do above.
And yes, I actually am completely serious about this.
A library licensed under the GPL requires the app to be GPL, so we see an obvious advantage given to Free developers. Readline is GPL'ed right? So, if you wish to take advantage of all the conveniences it gives you, well you have to GPL your program too. Having more free software doesn't hurt us much, now does it? Do I have any weight if I yell, "I want to use Readline in my closed source app but I can't. Therefore Readline and whoever wrote it are evil incarnate! Burn them! Burn them!!"
I have lots of good news for you. First of all, you have the wonderful position of seeing an alleged advantage that many of us never quite manage to make out. You are obviously a gifted and sensitive person.
The next piece of good news is that I freed the encumbered readline library using my innovative freedline package.
Another piece of good news is that by this device have all the GPL-encumbered libraries everywhere been freed, rendering them useful again as LGPL'd libraries (L standing for Library, of course).
Finally, my last piece of good news is that since then I've found that there are at least three other readline implementations out there, which means that you needn't even use my device. But it would still prove efficacious in freeing other libraries encumbered with the GPL.
Thanks for the info. I'm curious how snarf-and-barf works with wide characters.
Yes, I know about paragraph breaks. And I even know that in HTML, they're supposed to be with a P instead of multiple BRs.
But the extra question was there that way because it didn't get attached to the itemized listing in the other top-level thread of mine here, the one which has a high score, where it would have been question #8. I wasn't breaking them up into separate pieces, so each question would appear to be the same thing.
And yes, I'm aware that using a full stop is not a sign of weakness.:-)
With my experience with GNOME/Enlightenment, I love to play with it, but it takes a lot of tinkering and scrounging for answers through countless FAQ's, mailing lists and (limited) documentation, then searching out and downloading tons of prerequesits before you can install it.
I think most of us who've tried that have had the same sort of depressing experience. There's nothing more frustrating than spending all day downloading and installing a zillion libraries, only to find that not only can you still can't get what you wanted up and running, you've also irrevocably and mysteriously broken random other unrelated programs on your system.
For example, after trying to install a recednt version of ncurses, I find that anything that uses ncurses now dumps core for me like this:
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x2ab6336d in _IO_setvbuf (fp=0x2abfc7e0, buf=0x815a7c0 "", mode=0, size=2064) at iosetvbuf.c:92
This includes essential programs like talk and lynx. And because this is Linux, I can't just type
# cd/usr/src/usr.bin/talk # make install
to fix the problem. Curses! Foiled again!
Remarkably enough, I did finally get enlightenment working. Considering that the behemoth links against twenty-one (yes, that's 21, 3*7) different libraries (try running ldd against it), I'm pretty surprised it's working. Well, somewhat working. It refuses to call up the Gnome configuration tool anymore after the 0.16 upgrade. The RPMs ate my program, again, Teacher. I didn't touch it, really! It won't tell you why. You can't find any error messages. No place to trace it down. No complaints. Just. Plain. Nothing.
The abyss.
After a day of doing that and finding that the harder I tried, the behinder I got, as Redhate Linux configuration bitrot sent my beloved system spiralling into unusability, I decided not to throw good money after bad--to quit while I wasn't ahead, as it were.
So you can begin to imagine the tears of joy that streamed from my eyes, when, on my happy BSD system I typed:
# cd/usr/ports/x11/enlightenment/ # make install
And it worked. It fricking worked! It just did absofuckinglutely everything and it all worked! It fetched everything needed, in pure unmutilated source code. It never blew up because something wasn't there, it just obligingly fetched it, built in, installed it, and kept going without missing a beat. Not only did it work seamlessly, it managed to so without trashing my entire system.
I laughed. I cried. I giggled and gibbered with joy. I spat upon the parts of the disk on the Linux box where I thought the wicked RPMs lay smoldering. I sang praises to the mercies and the glories of the Source, whence all solutions come. The heavens themselves opened up, and the epiphany that seized me was nothing less than the full force and fury of the power of the Source. Blinded by the light, I heard the source angels trumpeting from on high (in D major): Death to RPMs! They are the Dark Side of Winix! They will destroy you! Return to the source, brother! Glory be to the Source! By Source alone are you saved!
Ok, deep breaths. Much better. I'm calm again.
I wanted you to know that you did suffer alone, that I too know intimately and painfully whereof you speak. I too have walked the Via Dolorosa that you describe. And I just wanted to share this blissful and fleeting moment of, um, enlightenment with you.:-)
What kind of support do you provide for localization and internationalization? Do the toolkit itself and all applications support locales (eg, ISO-8859-?), or is everything in American English? What support do you provide for real message catalogues? How much support Unicode for is there? Considering the profound differences--often conflicting and contradictory--in pictorial interpretations seen between diverse cultures, what are you doing to do to bring the idea of message catalogues into the graphical space of those funny little bitmapped icons and buttons? How easy will it be for an entire site to change the default configuration to use an alternate set of text labels, text messages, and graphical devices (buttons, etc) that make sense in its culture? What tools do you provide to developers and to administrators to facilitate this?
A great deal of energy and attention is being put into taking over the space currently dominated by Microsoft, the non-programmer's appliance-style computer needs. To this end, we see and endless stream of requests for strong intercompatibility with Microsoft programs. We see demands for a system that is immediately usable to Windows users, one that is understandable within two minutes of orientation, which requires no active administration, and is geared to suit the needs and expectations of the non-technical user.
Here are seven distinct question areas that follow from that:
Is this supposed to be simply a free rewrite of what is essentially existing Windows functionality, or is there something in it for the rest of us? If so, what kind of thing can we get excited about? What sort of consideration has been taken to accommodate the long-time, professional Unix user? What kind of compatibility is there for existing Unix programs and formats, and for the entire Unix mindset? Will we have to learn completely new editors, mailers, newsreaders, web browsers, and pagers, or are there hooks that respect the Unix users existing preferences in these areas? Does it feel like an integrated part of Unix, or something stuck on the side and completely apart? Is the default look and feel something that Unix users will find repulsive just because it reminds them too much of Microsoft? Do you use Windows widgets by default?
What support will there be for the handicapped and disabled? Will there be keyboard interfaces, or only mouse-based ones? Both the visually-impaired and the RSI-agonizing benefit greatly from having the option of employing a non-mouse, textual interface. Will there be keyboard-based, tab-style completion features? What about fully programmable completion at the toolkit and/or application level? Is there a way to do a quick text search through all menus so we don't have to do the same thing repeatedly? For example, the entire toolkit and window manager could conspire to let META-/ followed by a regexp take you directly to the currently focussed program's particular menu that contained that pattern no many how many mouse clicks deep it was in nested menus, and META-n could take you to the next match, META-N the previous one, etc.
Is there any scripting mechanism planned, preferably with a language-neutral API so that we can use bash, perl, guile, tcl, python, javascript, or even some BASIC-style language? Is there going to be anything like Microsoft's ActiveScripting stuff? How about anything analogous to Gtk/Perl?
What non-Windows systems have you evaluated in mining existing technology for ideas? How about XEROX Star or OS/2 or Amigas? Have you ever looked at AVS, the scientific visualization graphical shell? It has (or had, when I long ago looked at it) a very cool graphical representation in which datasets and filters get connected in by pipelines in a visual rather than a CLI way, which is sometimes easier to produce. IF you haven't seen it, think of what it might be to combine drag-and-drop with connect-the-dots.
What usability tests have you run? Were your subjects only Windows users, or did you try non-computer users as well? What about usability tests that involved professional, long-time Unix programmers?
In what ways do you see Gnome feeding ideas back into KDE, or vice versa? Is there anything from Gnome you've specifically rejected, or specifically incorporated? Same thing with Enlightenment.
What is the state of the documentation? Is it externally accessible, searchable, typesettable, and printable? Does each command have complete documentation of its calling interface, whether CLI or otherwise, and is this documentation externally accessible, or most you tediously step through help buttons in the program itself? What about configuration matters? Are they completely documented, or are you forced to read existing examples for a clue? Finally, what about the library functions that programmers will be using? Does each function have its own complete documentation, such as the fine work you see in glibc? Or are you forced to read existing programs to guess how things work instead of having a formal specification and description? Is all this documentation integrated into one place, or must you hunt all over for it?
closed source in that there were license restrictions
An absence of licensing restrictions is hardly sufficient to make something "open source", whether you go by the official OSI definition or whether you go by the more customary off-the-cuff definition most of us use. Otherwise nothing would be "open source" that wasn't public domain, and surely that's not the intent.
Sendmail Pro has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. BSDI has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. And yes, the FSF has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. Historically, even expensive mainframes sometimes gave you the source if you bought the systems, but if so, this certainly had licensing restrictions. And think of how many times we've all seen the ominous words that "This is unpublished source code of AT&T" or words to that effect on the troff macro kits. That's obviously source, too.
Programmers care about source code. User don't. So?
The whole matter of RPMs and even SRPMs are a real pain in the butt if you care about source code. I certainly wish that someone would release a Linux operating system where you could just do cd/usr/src and find everything where it belongs, and where you could say could Just Type Make (tm:-).
But I don't think it will happen. Vendors who make and sell Linux operating systems are, as you observe, selling them to non-programmers, people who don't care about source code. So we're hosed.
If you think that a licence being more free is not necessarily better, does it not follow then that a licence which is less free is not necessarily worse?
Anyway, I don't really think that "most of the free software out there" is under the GPL, anyway. Look at X. Look at Apache. Look at the languages, like Perl, Tcl, and Python. Look at virtually all the stuff that comes with BSD.
Being a good moderator is very hard. How many can consistently resist the attempt to bump up something we agree with? Very few, I imagine, once we are honest with ourselves.
Well, the flip side of that is that is't really hard to resist bumping down what we disagree with.
I have a theory. I bet that within any group there are a few fanatics. And that the bigger the group the more the absolute number of fanatics.
And I believe that a fanatic is more apt to bump down something he disagrees with than to bump up something he agrees with. Why? Because the negative affect sticks in his craw--affects him--more than the positive one does.
If this is all true, and there are more pro-Linux folks than pro-BSD folks, then you would expect to see more anti-Linux statements zapped than you would see anti-BSD statements zapped. Right? Is this happening?
Guess what? It's gotten a lot worse. Run your stats now.
On the Oxymoronity of Mandated Moralities
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FreeBSD at COMDEX
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· Score: 3
You, DragonHawk, wrote:
You:What tactics? Telling the truth? No, spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in an attempt to "prove" an opinion, and insulting me and whoever else disagrees with you. To wit:
You: I keep thinking you'll understand if I speak slowly, or something. I'm not going to dignify that by replying in kind.
Don't be so quick to read insult where none is intended. No matter what it looks like, what I was really and truly thinking was that maybe I'm just talking too fast and jumping haphazardly from one thing to the next using giant leaps without giving you a sufficient chance to see the individual steps I was taking along the way. You seem like a reasonable fellow, and I wondered therefore whether I just wasn't spelling out where I was coming from or how I got to where I landed, and without clear premises and detailed conclusions, and that's why it wasn't making any sense to you.
The words which you deemed an insult were in fact reflective of sentiments that were anything but.
You then continued to write:
Me: The GPL is designed to ensure that the source code for a piece of software remains available to everyone at all times. That is all. Nothing more, and nothing less.
You: Many licences do that, the LGPL, BSDL, and AL being amongst those.
Incorrect. The BSD license (AFAIK: reference) and the Artistic license both allow distribution of binary-only, modified versions of the original source code. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although some think it is. However, regardless of whether it is good or bad, both the BSDL and AL do not include the protections against "embrace and extend" and freeloading that the GPL does.
What's happening is that we're not talking about the same thing. Yes, you're right that the BSDL and the AL permit binary distributions. The AL goes further than the BSDL in what it says about making the source for that binary distribution available.
That really wasn't the thrust behind my comment. What I was trying to express was that if you put any of these OSI-style licences on a bit of code, then that code will always have that licence. You can't just take a bit of AL'd code (or whichever licence) and throw away the old licence and re-license it as you feel like. The originally licensed code stands, and it stands forever--or at least until the owner himself releases it under an alternate licence. That means that the original code is not going to "go away" or be "taken over". You can't do that with the original code. It's got a free licence on it, and that's that. The difference is that free licences other than the GPL allow you to license your own software that uses the original stuff in any way that you care to. Even if you do so, the original remains inviolate. Nothing can happen to it.
That's what I meant when I said that the other free licences make sure that the code "stays free". Surely you must see that they do this. But you're talking about something else: code that wasn't in the original. Yes, you're right, the other licences make no claims upon that code the way the GPL does. But this hardly changes the original code.
(Yes, some of that was redundant.)
Microsoft's old strategy of "embrace and extend"--which in fact is often "embrace, extend, and extinguish"--is going to be with us no matter what we do. Look at the whole MS-HTML fiasco. This was an open standard. That didn't stop Microsoft from using it to screw the world into reliance upon them through Microsoft-only extensions. Do you really think getting a copy of their exact code to handle this crud would make any difference? I don't think it would. I don't see that licensing could make any difference here. Even if you define in the standard that extensions would make the result no longer be standard [whatever], as for example, I have heard said about XML, I can't see this stopping the Microsoft juggernaut from attempting to give you a "better" version. They'd say, well sure, MS-ML isn't XML (or whatever), it's better, and it's fully compatible with simple XML (or whatever). Think about POSIX, again.
So I think your fears about "embrace and extend" are well-founded, but your apparent conclusion that the GPL would adequately address this issue, and do so in a way that other free licenses would not, seems incorrect.
You: It [the GPL] sneaks its viral fingers into code
This is FUD. There is nothing sneaky about the GPL. Indeed, many (myself included) think certain people are far too vocal about why the GPL should be the One True License. Calling the GPL "viral" is about the same as calling Perl an "unreadable" language. Both have an element of truth, and neither are fair.
It is worth pointing out that FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) is not the same as a lie. FUD must have some truth in it, or it is easily refuted as a lie. FUD exists in the margins of error that human language and understanding allow, and in areas of opinion and subjectivity.
My colorful use of "viral fingers" is simply that. I grow weary of the times that I see the term "FUD" used to brand an opinion with which the antagonist disagrees. That's what I think you're doing, and I don't think it's fair. I've been completely up-front about why I consider the FSF to be dangerously dishonest in the whole GPL issue. I have repeatedly requested that they stop spinning stories and twisting common definitions. Their doing so has without a doubt tricked at least some people into misunderstanding how the GPL works, why it's there, and what its ramifications entail. I believe that this is an intentional deception, a cheap word game they will never admit to, but from which they clearly benefit. It would not take more than a few small fixes in the surrounding literature to clarify matters for honesty's sake. No licence changes. Just spin changes so as not to misrepresent what's happening.
They don't do that. Therefore, they don't mind that it tricks people. Hard to see how using "sneaky" is inappropriate there.
As for "viral", this, too, has a long tale behind it, and it was hardly I who first made the observation and coined the term. I don't care that the term should discomfit the FSF. There are clearly ways in which the term is descriptive of the action. Yes, it has a negative connotation. Yes, I intended to use a term with a negative connotation. I did so, quite simply, because to my mind the term fits. I did not do so to cause people to fear something they did not understand, nor to be uncertain about the reality of the matter, nor to doubt for some nebulous and amorphous reason the intentions of the parties involved.
But let's get back to the matter at hand. Does the GPL infect code you write? No.
I think, perhaps, we are not understanding the word "infect" to mean the same thing, because I cannot see how a reasonable man could say what you have just said if his understanding of the words and the effects involved were the same as I myself hold.
What it does is prevent you from taking GPL code and including it in your own works.
I note with some amusement that many GPL advocates disagree with your statement. Their standard retort is that it doesn't stop you from doing that; it merely imposes conditions upon your use of the resulting work. This is deceptive sophistry on their part. I agree with you here, and commend you for not falling into their webs of deceit.
Nevertheless, this prevention that hardly seems sporting, not does it? I can barely think of a potent disincentive to code reuse. And code reuse frees programmers from needlessly reinventing the wheel.
You still retain complete and total ownership of your code.
I think either we are actually in profound but subtle agreement, or else we have severely disparate notions of what constitutes "complete and total ownership of your code". If I have complete and total ownership of my code, then I as owner may do whatsoever I please with that code. Alas, the FSF would have you believe otherwise.
One can of course avoid this through linking. The FSF really hates this idea, and they routinely cluck enough about its legal viability that fair-minded people everywhere are uncertain about the true effects. But in the client-server days of RPC, CGI, DLLs, CORBA, OLE, COM, mobile agents, and other segmented forms of computation, it becomes increasingly obvious that the GPL cannot possibly be as infective/effective at reaching across those boundaries as the FSF wishes it were. That's how I made removed the virus from all GPL'd libraries and made them LGPL'd. Even Bruce Perens has confessed here in this forum that such separations are going to happen in the computing models we see today, and that the GPL does not address them. My recollection is that he called them "loopholes".
The restrictions come from the inability to distribute the other, GPL code. Your code is not affected!
I agree with you that my code code is not affected. The FSF, however, most vociferously disagrees with both of us. They claim that the GPL means that I cannot distribute my own code under my own terms. If I can't do as I will with my own code, then it is hardly unaffected, nor am I its complete and total owner. That's there position. Mine is that I am complete and total owner, and am consequently free to do whatever I please with that which is mine.
The only problems arise from the copyright violation that would occur if you redistributed the GPL code in your own code, without credit and return.
It is, well, peculiar at best, that copyright law should extend its notion of a derived work in this way. The FSF recognizes no notion of proportion in their figmentational notions of what constitutes a derived work, staying completely boolean in their thinking. The courts have never been so binary.
In any event, that's not what the issue is. The issue is that the FSF feels that their code affects my code, that their licence on their code spreads to everything their code touches, meaning my code, and that this process continues in perpetuity, without regard to dilution or proportionality. It is this very complete silliness that they espouse which has engendered the notion of the GPL being an infectious virus. If you prefer another way of thinking about how silly it is, consider it as an application of digital homeopathy.
What is this credit and return business? Basically, the GPL is designed to help promote open source/free software/whatever, and to ensure that closed-source developers do not get a free ride. Again, all it "forces" anyone to do is keep the original code free.
Surely you don't really believe that, do you? Free licences will do that, but not the GPL. The GPL affects other code in a way that a free licence does not. This is my entire point. Yes, it forces. But it forces something else. It forces what happens to something other than the original code. It allows the author of one work to restrict what happens to the work of an entirely different author.
Can you imagine how silly it would be if a book were published whose copyright included a restriction that the book could not be used by black people, or in a public library, or placed on the same shelf as a book by a different author? Imagine if a song were published under a restriction that it could not be played a station that also played a song by a competing musician, and that any other songs played by that station fell under the same restriction as the first song? Really, it's completely silly.
In an effort to keep open source going, the GPL prevents another company from using GPL'ed code to create a proprietary, sourceless product.
I've always found "use" restrictions very strange. See my previous paragraph. And I find it nothing short of mendacious that the FSF should claim their restrictions are anything but that.
I think -- and this is strictly my personal opinion -- that it is reasonable that, if I am going to take the time and effort to create some software, that some other company should not get a free ride from me, or take my code and lock it up in their product.
Yours is a very common sentiment, and I can certainly respect your feelings on this matter. A lot of people feel this way. That's why you so many licensing terms that in effect grant unlimited non-commercial use, but that for commercial use, you must contact the author to make other arrangements. I can hardly fault them too strongly for this, because I do hear what they're feeling. They've done their work for free, and they don't want people to get some benefit out their work which they themselves are not getting.
According to the FSF, this is not free source, open software, or anything else you care to call it, because it's got anti-commercial restrictions. And then they tell you that their restrictions which bar anyone from using their software in what any businessman would be call a commercial sense (traditional fee-for-licence schemes) is not anti-commercial. Who but George Orwell could be so proud of the boldness of this spin job?
It would be more honest of the FSF to get out of the business of word games and related spin. But they are, fundamentally, a politico-economic foundation, not a technical one. They wish that all software were GPL'd, because they could thereby impose their morality upon others by the--what word do you want me to say here other than the completely honest "infective nature" or "viral nature"--perhaps "collateral damages", then--of the GPL.
I must confess that I have on a few occasions in the past, and doubtless several in the future, contemplated places where I would dearly delight in seeing the GPL installed and enforced. Oh, you do not know how sorely tempted I have been! One example is with Microsoft's operating systems products, because if they were court-ordered to slap the GPL on their OSes, that would be a likely end to their strategy of putatively "integrating" into the OS any application area that they care to monopolize.
But you know what? This is a personal weakness of mine, and I must overcome the urge. Tempting though it may sound, I must reject the temptation. I must. That's because it is fundamentally immoral to coerce others to behave in accord with your own sense of morality. It doesn't matter whether your morality happens to be the best around, or even the best there can ever be. Coercion is by its very nature by definition immoral. As with the paradox of having your cake and eating it too, morally you simply cannot enforce your own morality on others without sacrificing that very moral high ground which you would claim to occupy. Without free will, there can be no morality at all.
Oh really? There was a time that "everyone" said that sun revolved about the earth. Did that not make it so? By your statement, it must have. Such was the received (or, as it was also ecclesiastical, dispensed) wisdom of the day. But remember the nature and context of Galileo's famous words: Eppur si muove. Freely translated into the vernacular of our times, that would come across more like, "Yeah, dude, whatever. It still frickin' moves. Duh!"
I have little doubt that, as you have written, "99% of the population [...] will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium [sic]". Does one care? Returning to Galileo, the whole world can jolly well stand up and claim that heavier things fall faster than lighter things, but does that in any fashion whatsoever alter the nature of reality? Of course not. They'd simply be wrong.
Majority rule is irrelevant in matters of pure, hard mathematics. You cannot lobby your way into changing the fundamental laws. You can only deceive yourself and others, as so many appear to have done. Reality ignores you. There is no vote. There is no court. And there is no appeal. Cold, stark reality is no democratic institution subject to the superstitious folly of one's fellow moron. Thank God.
But then again, why should we believe people who can't even manage to figure out how to spell millennium, let alone understand why that difference is critical for discerning years from asses?:-)
Per your perspicacious suggestion, gladly would I inquire of a newborn's mother whether her child was now in his zeroth or his first year of life. (Mothers are quite sensitive to these things, and it was clever of you to make you witty proposal.) The answer all would give, of course, is that on his first day of life, that newborn has also commenced his first year of the same. You know this is true. And if you do not, you have but to ask. Try your own experiment.
I should be further delighted to ask a mother of a child of 24 months how old her infant is, and whether he's about to celebrate his second or his third birthday. And I hope you're there with me, for then would you see that each and every one of these happy women would be quick to report that her child was about to celebrate the completion of his second year, and thus would be celebrating his "second birthday". And in all likelihood, not just a few of these fine mothers would quietly or unquietly consider you a touch daft that you would even begin to imagine holding a third birthday party at the end of only four and twenty tender months of life.
The inability to reason has never been a trait hard to find in the muddling masses. This millennial matter is merely yet another clear demonstration of their collective inability to grasp numbers--or, given the profligate orthographic transgressions as evinced by your own posting, words as well.
And remember: The world wouldn't need so many nitpickers if there weren't so damned many nitwits.
Translation in C, C++, Java, or Javascript is left for as an exercise for the reader, but approaches the trivial.
Yes, it's possible they'll just use it without thinking, and yes, that's what got us into this mess. But if they use it without thinking, we'll be fine. And if they do think about it, then that's at least a step in the right direction.
Here's a couple questions for you: considering the struct tm's definition of tm_year in so many languages
how many cases of print outs showing 19100 do you think we'll we see next year?
how many will still be around to say 19101 when the millennium finally rolls around?:-)
Re:Not to start a flamewar with YOU of all people.
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
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· Score: 2
The reason that I believe Microsoft could crack the GPL like an eggshell is because I saw how they castrated POSIX. If they can do that, what do you think they can do to anybody, anywhere, any time? Yes, I believe that the GPL's infinite infection attributes are ignorant of copyright case law and wouldn't stand up based on that. And I've shown how GPL'd libraries no longer exist for purposes of linking. But the real source of my comment is that I believe Microsoft could disregard the GPL if they wanted to. And I doubt you want to see that.
The first is I find out whether someone feels they were born in the 19th or the 20th century. They always say the 20th, even though it was 19xx. This can yield to understanding. If it doesn't, go on to step w.
The other way is to make them pretend they're setting up bridge tables, 4 people per table. You then ask whether the 8th person to arrive would be part of the 2nd or the 3rd table. Eventually they get it. Or get annoyed.:-)
I'm not sure this rampant innumeracy is as annoying the rampant illiteracy of the Thousand Asses:
Mille + anus => millenial problems, which really hurts.
Mille + annum => millennial problems, which would at least be less frequent.
...the GPL pretends to lay claim over someone else's work.
Interesting interpretation. On which licensing points is this based?
The FSF would have you believe that if you have five lines of lovingly incorporated GPL'd code that they wrote in a program that contains 50,000 lines of code that you wrote, then they get to tell you what terms you can set on your own code. They want you to believe that your code becomes GPL'd, and that you therfore can't license it in the traditional way. This is a ludicrous notion, and has no basis in copyright law that I can uncover. It hasn't been proven in a court of law, so everything you here is pure opinion, including this missive. The worst case would be that a court might find you owed them for some 1/10,000th part of whatever you managed to make, and even then, I'm dubious. But that's the kind of thing you see in other copyright cases involving derived works. I don't personally believe that a court would buy the poison pill story, because the courts have a tradition of looking at proportions when it comes to infringement, plagiarmism, and damages. What the FSF pretends is too much like homeopathy to my mind. Note that I'm not talking about taking something like gcc and adding your own bits. That's pretty clear. I'm talking about taking a few lines of their code. Even if this doesn't count as fair use, there's no way it can be recursively contaminating. The most hilarious thing is that FSF have you believe that somebody who then used a few lines of your code (which they didn't write) would now also be contaminated. They'd do a lot better if they stuck to what seems fair and reasonable. It's this unsubstantiable extremism that has driven open source advocates to friendlier licences, and friendlier subgroups.
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Why don't all programs built for one Linux-based operating system work for another one? For myriads of reasons, including hardware version, kernel versions, operating system versions, adminstrative strategies, and user environment. I have numerous such examples, as do we all.
And so I see that the old school yet follows that time-tested tradition: By their postings shall ye know them. :-)
But I think there's something critical that you failed to mention. You're talking about a conversation that's time delayed. When I send someone mail, even if they read and respond right away, there's still a significant latency between the time that I was composing my note and when I eventually read their response. This time lag can easily stretch into days--sometimes even longer.
Despite the readily observable fact that most electronic communications are written as though they were quick post-it notes, at least in the case of those media which are not interactive in real time, our written words often have a lot more to do than they would in a simple post-it note. They need to make up for the missing context.
Back when folks actually sent each other letters in the post, a very different sort of communication occurred. This is particularly evident in those letters that went overseas, or which were composed before we had our mail delivered by high-speed aircraft. In these circumstances, a great deal more care was put into careful drafting and composition. The greater the latency in delivery, the more context would be provided, the more care taken.
Today when you send mail via the computer, you find that unlike the many famous collected letters of our forefathers, our own written notes no longer use what one would call "written English". In the vast majority of cases, communications via electronic media are treated with a level of informality that was previously found only on post cards and notes stuck on the front of the fridge or computer terminal. In other words, most of us employ "spoken English" in our daily electronic exchanges.
But as you yourself noted, there's a grave problem here. The amount of context provided is nothing like what you would get in a face-to-face, real-time conversation. It doesn't even compare favorably with the environment of a telephone conversation, in which you can at least perceive the intonation and stress patterns of the other party's voice.
The art of writing letters, and, all too often it seems today, the very art of writing itself, have faded into historical obscurity leaving us an impoverished shell of sound bytes and surface banter. As disturbing as the effect itself is the realization that this has happened to us without even our being aware of what we were losing.
Once you recognize that written and spoken English are, in some senses, different languages, you can start to analyse their respective advantages and disadvantages. Clearly spoken English is more spontaneous than written English. But the written form enjoys a far richer potential because of its capacity to hold and convey more nuance and detail from the writer to his reader. And it's not actually as much harder as you might initially fear. That's because no one requires you to type the same words that youd' use in a quick pub chat. In a written medium, you are free to choose your words more carefully, to play games with word order, and to compose sentences of a richer syntactic pattern than most of are comfortable doing in in a spoken medium. And you can clean up your mistakes, too.
There is much to be said for adopting a considered hand in all but the most ephemeral of written exchanges. There is no question that this requires more time, more effort. It's also true that in some contexts, such increased levels of care and attention are largely unwarranted. And it must be recognized that what one would consider writing using "written English" is hardly a skill that comes naturally to everyone, and that we must not discourage those who have a hard time with using written English from contributing their unique voices to the collective discourse.
That being said, if there is one thing I would dearly like to see is for our children to rediscover the enchantment of the written word. They must be challenged to read as much as they can. Of no less importance is their commensurate need to write as much they can, too. Literacy has plummeted in the United States over the last few decades from a place of honor in the world rankings to one of considerable shame. I do not pretend to understand all the causes, but a principal component to the solution is both simple and clear: more reading, more writing.
I do not know that the increased penetration of the Internet has necessarily helped this situation of our society's loss of the written word. I see scant little written English being written today in our on-line mail and news exchanges, nor in any other forum you care to name, this one included. Then again, I don't intend to blame the net for this, either. Our newspapers are written at a fifth-grade level; our weekly news magazines in America are little improved beyond that. It would not surprise me to learn that the majority of Americans would probably find not merely Scientific American but even The Economist too complex in word choice and syntactic structure for their diminished capabilities.
Do our children even recognize the written world they could be participating in on-line? I don't know. Probably they relegate that world of writing to their grammar schools. But the better they can write and the better they can organize their ideas and thoughts and then convey these to others, the better they will do later in life, largely irrespective of which particular career they land in. Communication skills help everywhere.
Why, after all, do you think that liberal arts majors are in such high demand these days? Not a small part of it is from their generalist training and their ability to communicate well, It is an area that the stereotypical geek is often not at his best, but it doesn't have to be.
So next time you jot out a piece of mail, especially if it's something that really matters to you, remember that the person on the other end isn't right there in the same room watching you, nor are they on phone listening to you, either. Consider the context they'll be losing, and try to make up for this loss by the quality of you writing.
And whatever you do, please read over your message twice before actually sending it. Remember: what you write once wil by others be read a million times, especially in this particlar forum. :-) Look for bugs, redundancies, inconsistencies, and awkward constructs in your prose just as you might look for these infelicities in your source code. People will be tacitly thankful you did. Best of all, you'll stand a much better change of getting your point across--which is, after all, why you're bothering to type something in the first place.
These days such calls are a lot less frequent an occurrence. I bet it doesn't happen more than once or thrice a month. This works out well, because we never know where each other really is geographically, so a phone call wouldn't work anyway. It's all nice and real-time. It probably helps that we all type at about 80 words per minute, or better. (And no, I don't know what that is in metric. :-)
That's snarf-and-barf.
As you see, this "left" and "right" terminology is completely wrong. Last time I looked at KDE, it kept telling me to use left button and right button, despite the fact that this was completely wrong. You see, I always execute xmodmap -e 'pointer = 3 2 1', which takes care of that. But the stupid messages don't track this. That's highly stupid. You can either fix it to track this correctly, or you can stop using messages that discrimate against someone's manual orientation, as I have attempted to do above.
And yes, I actually am completely serious about this.
The next piece of good news is that I freed the encumbered readline library using my innovative freedline package.
Another piece of good news is that by this device have all the GPL-encumbered libraries everywhere been freed, rendering them useful again as LGPL'd libraries (L standing for Library, of course).
Finally, my last piece of good news is that since then I've found that there are at least three other readline implementations out there, which means that you needn't even use my device. But it would still prove efficacious in freeing other libraries encumbered with the GPL.
Be free! Be happy!
Yes, I know about paragraph breaks. And I even know that in HTML, they're supposed to be with a P instead of multiple BRs.
But the extra question was there that way because it didn't get attached to the itemized listing in the other top-level thread of mine here, the one which has a high score, where it would have been question #8. I wasn't breaking them up into separate pieces, so each question would appear to be the same thing.
And yes, I'm aware that using a full stop is not a sign of weakness. :-)
For example, after trying to install a recednt version of ncurses, I find that anything that uses ncurses now dumps core for me like this:
This includes essential programs like talk and lynx. And because this is Linux, I can't just type to fix the problem. Curses! Foiled again!Remarkably enough, I did finally get enlightenment working. Considering that the behemoth links against twenty-one (yes, that's 21, 3*7) different libraries (try running ldd against it), I'm pretty surprised it's working. Well, somewhat working. It refuses to call up the Gnome configuration tool anymore after the 0.16 upgrade. The RPMs ate my program, again, Teacher. I didn't touch it, really! It won't tell you why. You can't find any error messages. No place to trace it down. No complaints. Just. Plain. Nothing.
The abyss.
After a day of doing that and finding that the harder I tried, the behinder I got, as Redhate Linux configuration bitrot sent my beloved system spiralling into unusability, I decided not to throw good money after bad--to quit while I wasn't ahead, as it were.
So you can begin to imagine the tears of joy that streamed from my eyes, when, on my happy BSD system I typed:
And it worked. It fricking worked! It just did absofuckinglutely everything and it all worked! It fetched everything needed, in pure unmutilated source code. It never blew up because something wasn't there, it just obligingly fetched it, built in, installed it, and kept going without missing a beat. Not only did it work seamlessly, it managed to so without trashing my entire system.I laughed. I cried. I giggled and gibbered with joy. I spat upon the parts of the disk on the Linux box where I thought the wicked RPMs lay smoldering. I sang praises to the mercies and the glories of the Source, whence all solutions come. The heavens themselves opened up, and the epiphany that seized me was nothing less than the full force and fury of the power of the Source. Blinded by the light, I heard the source angels trumpeting from on high (in D major): Death to RPMs! They are the Dark Side of Winix! They will destroy you! Return to the source, brother! Glory be to the Source! By Source alone are you saved!
Ok, deep breaths. Much better. I'm calm again.
I wanted you to know that you did suffer alone, that I too know intimately and painfully whereof you speak. I too have walked the Via Dolorosa that you describe. And I just wanted to share this blissful and fleeting moment of, um, enlightenment with you. :-)
What kind of support do you provide for localization and internationalization? Do the toolkit itself and all applications support locales (eg, ISO-8859-?), or is everything in American English? What support do you provide for real message catalogues? How much support Unicode for is there? Considering the profound differences--often conflicting and contradictory--in pictorial interpretations seen between diverse cultures, what are you doing to do to bring the idea of message catalogues into the graphical space of those funny little bitmapped icons and buttons? How easy will it be for an entire site to change the default configuration to use an alternate set of text labels, text messages, and graphical devices (buttons, etc) that make sense in its culture? What tools do you provide to developers and to administrators to facilitate this?
Here are seven distinct question areas that follow from that:
- Is this supposed to be simply a free rewrite of what is essentially existing Windows functionality, or is there something in it for the rest of us? If so, what kind of thing can we get excited about? What sort of consideration has been taken to accommodate the long-time, professional Unix user? What kind of compatibility is there for existing Unix programs and formats, and for the entire Unix mindset? Will we have to learn completely new editors, mailers, newsreaders, web browsers, and pagers, or are there hooks that respect the Unix users existing preferences in these areas? Does it feel like an integrated part of Unix, or something stuck on the side and completely apart? Is the default look and feel something that Unix users will find repulsive just because it reminds them too much of Microsoft? Do you use Windows widgets by default?
- What support will there be for the handicapped and disabled? Will there be keyboard interfaces, or only mouse-based ones? Both the visually-impaired and the RSI-agonizing benefit greatly from having the option of employing a non-mouse, textual interface. Will there be keyboard-based, tab-style completion features? What about fully programmable completion at the toolkit and/or application level? Is there a way to do a quick text search through all menus so we don't have to do the same thing repeatedly? For example, the entire toolkit and window manager could conspire to let META-/ followed by a regexp take you directly to the currently focussed program's particular menu that contained that pattern no many how many mouse clicks deep it was in nested menus, and META-n could take you to the next match, META-N the previous one, etc.
- Is there any scripting mechanism planned, preferably with a language-neutral API so that we can use bash, perl, guile, tcl, python, javascript, or even some BASIC-style language? Is there going to be anything like Microsoft's ActiveScripting stuff? How about anything analogous to Gtk/Perl?
- What non-Windows systems have you evaluated in mining existing technology for ideas? How about XEROX Star or OS/2 or Amigas? Have you ever looked at AVS, the scientific visualization graphical shell? It has (or had, when I long ago looked at it) a very cool graphical representation in which datasets and filters get connected in by pipelines in a visual rather than a CLI way, which is sometimes easier to produce. IF you haven't seen it, think of what it might be to combine drag-and-drop with connect-the-dots.
- What usability tests have you run? Were your subjects only Windows users, or did you try non-computer users as well? What about usability tests that involved professional, long-time Unix programmers?
- In what ways do you see Gnome feeding ideas back into KDE, or vice versa? Is there anything from Gnome you've specifically rejected, or specifically incorporated? Same thing with Enlightenment.
- What is the state of the documentation? Is it externally accessible, searchable, typesettable, and printable? Does each command have complete documentation of its calling interface, whether CLI or otherwise, and is this documentation externally accessible, or most you tediously step through help buttons in the program itself? What about configuration matters? Are they completely documented, or are you forced to read existing examples for a clue? Finally, what about the library functions that programmers will be using? Does each function have its own complete documentation, such as the fine work you see in glibc? Or are you forced to read existing programs to guess how things work instead of having a formal specification and description? Is all this documentation integrated into one place, or must you hunt all over for it?
Well, that's enough for now.Sendmail Pro has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. BSDI has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. And yes, the FSF has licensing restrictions, but you get the source. Historically, even expensive mainframes sometimes gave you the source if you bought the systems, but if so, this certainly had licensing restrictions. And think of how many times we've all seen the ominous words that "This is unpublished source code of AT&T" or words to that effect on the troff macro kits. That's obviously source, too.
The whole matter of RPMs and even SRPMs are a real pain in the butt if you care about source code. I certainly wish that someone would release a Linux operating system where you could just do cd /usr/src and find everything where it belongs, and where you could say could Just Type Make (tm :-).
But I don't think it will happen. Vendors who make and sell Linux operating systems are, as you observe, selling them to non-programmers, people who don't care about source code. So we're hosed.
Fortunately, other solutions exist. :-)
Anyway, I don't really think that "most of the free software out there" is under the GPL, anyway. Look at X. Look at Apache. Look at the languages, like Perl, Tcl, and Python. Look at virtually all the stuff that comes with BSD.
But I'm not sure that it matters.
Well, the flip side of that is that is't really hard to resist bumping down what we disagree with.
I have a theory. I bet that within any group there are a few fanatics. And that the bigger the group the more the absolute number of fanatics.
And I believe that a fanatic is more apt to bump down something he disagrees with than to bump up something he agrees with. Why? Because the negative affect sticks in his craw--affects him--more than the positive one does.
If this is all true, and there are more pro-Linux folks than pro-BSD folks, then you would expect to see more anti-Linux statements zapped than you would see anti-BSD statements zapped. Right? Is this happening?
Guess what? It's gotten a lot worse. Run your stats now.
The words which you deemed an insult were in fact reflective of sentiments that were anything but.
You then continued to write:
What's happening is that we're not talking about the same thing. Yes, you're right that the BSDL and the AL permit binary distributions. The AL goes further than the BSDL in what it says about making the source for that binary distribution available.That really wasn't the thrust behind my comment. What I was trying to express was that if you put any of these OSI-style licences on a bit of code, then that code will always have that licence. You can't just take a bit of AL'd code (or whichever licence) and throw away the old licence and re-license it as you feel like. The originally licensed code stands, and it stands forever--or at least until the owner himself releases it under an alternate licence. That means that the original code is not going to "go away" or be "taken over". You can't do that with the original code. It's got a free licence on it, and that's that. The difference is that free licences other than the GPL allow you to license your own software that uses the original stuff in any way that you care to. Even if you do so, the original remains inviolate. Nothing can happen to it.
That's what I meant when I said that the other free licences make sure that the code "stays free". Surely you must see that they do this. But you're talking about something else: code that wasn't in the original. Yes, you're right, the other licences make no claims upon that code the way the GPL does. But this hardly changes the original code.
(Yes, some of that was redundant.)
Microsoft's old strategy of "embrace and extend"--which in fact is often "embrace, extend, and extinguish"--is going to be with us no matter what we do. Look at the whole MS-HTML fiasco. This was an open standard. That didn't stop Microsoft from using it to screw the world into reliance upon them through Microsoft-only extensions. Do you really think getting a copy of their exact code to handle this crud would make any difference? I don't think it would. I don't see that licensing could make any difference here. Even if you define in the standard that extensions would make the result no longer be standard [whatever], as for example, I have heard said about XML, I can't see this stopping the Microsoft juggernaut from attempting to give you a "better" version. They'd say, well sure, MS-ML isn't XML (or whatever), it's better, and it's fully compatible with simple XML (or whatever). Think about POSIX, again.
So I think your fears about "embrace and extend" are well-founded, but your apparent conclusion that the GPL would adequately address this issue, and do so in a way that other free licenses would not, seems incorrect.
My colorful use of "viral fingers" is simply that. I grow weary of the times that I see the term "FUD" used to brand an opinion with which the antagonist disagrees. That's what I think you're doing, and I don't think it's fair. I've been completely up-front about why I consider the FSF to be dangerously dishonest in the whole GPL issue. I have repeatedly requested that they stop spinning stories and twisting common definitions. Their doing so has without a doubt tricked at least some people into misunderstanding how the GPL works, why it's there, and what its ramifications entail. I believe that this is an intentional deception, a cheap word game they will never admit to, but from which they clearly benefit. It would not take more than a few small fixes in the surrounding literature to clarify matters for honesty's sake. No licence changes. Just spin changes so as not to misrepresent what's happening.They don't do that. Therefore, they don't mind that it tricks people. Hard to see how using "sneaky" is inappropriate there.
As for "viral", this, too, has a long tale behind it, and it was hardly I who first made the observation and coined the term. I don't care that the term should discomfit the FSF. There are clearly ways in which the term is descriptive of the action. Yes, it has a negative connotation. Yes, I intended to use a term with a negative connotation. I did so, quite simply, because to my mind the term fits. I did not do so to cause people to fear something they did not understand, nor to be uncertain about the reality of the matter, nor to doubt for some nebulous and amorphous reason the intentions of the parties involved.
I think, perhaps, we are not understanding the word "infect" to mean the same thing, because I cannot see how a reasonable man could say what you have just said if his understanding of the words and the effects involved were the same as I myself hold. I note with some amusement that many GPL advocates disagree with your statement. Their standard retort is that it doesn't stop you from doing that; it merely imposes conditions upon your use of the resulting work. This is deceptive sophistry on their part. I agree with you here, and commend you for not falling into their webs of deceit.Nevertheless, this prevention that hardly seems sporting, not does it? I can barely think of a potent disincentive to code reuse. And code reuse frees programmers from needlessly reinventing the wheel.
I think either we are actually in profound but subtle agreement, or else we have severely disparate notions of what constitutes "complete and total ownership of your code". If I have complete and total ownership of my code, then I as owner may do whatsoever I please with that code. Alas, the FSF would have you believe otherwise.One can of course avoid this through linking. The FSF really hates this idea, and they routinely cluck enough about its legal viability that fair-minded people everywhere are uncertain about the true effects. But in the client-server days of RPC, CGI, DLLs, CORBA, OLE, COM, mobile agents, and other segmented forms of computation, it becomes increasingly obvious that the GPL cannot possibly be as infective/effective at reaching across those boundaries as the FSF wishes it were. That's how I made removed the virus from all GPL'd libraries and made them LGPL'd. Even Bruce Perens has confessed here in this forum that such separations are going to happen in the computing models we see today, and that the GPL does not address them. My recollection is that he called them "loopholes".
I agree with you that my code code is not affected. The FSF, however, most vociferously disagrees with both of us. They claim that the GPL means that I cannot distribute my own code under my own terms. If I can't do as I will with my own code, then it is hardly unaffected, nor am I its complete and total owner. That's there position. Mine is that I am complete and total owner, and am consequently free to do whatever I please with that which is mine. It is, well, peculiar at best, that copyright law should extend its notion of a derived work in this way. The FSF recognizes no notion of proportion in their figmentational notions of what constitutes a derived work, staying completely boolean in their thinking. The courts have never been so binary.In any event, that's not what the issue is. The issue is that the FSF feels that their code affects my code, that their licence on their code spreads to everything their code touches, meaning my code, and that this process continues in perpetuity, without regard to dilution or proportionality. It is this very complete silliness that they espouse which has engendered the notion of the GPL being an infectious virus. If you prefer another way of thinking about how silly it is, consider it as an application of digital homeopathy.
Surely you don't really believe that, do you? Free licences will do that, but not the GPL. The GPL affects other code in a way that a free licence does not. This is my entire point. Yes, it forces. But it forces something else. It forces what happens to something other than the original code. It allows the author of one work to restrict what happens to the work of an entirely different author.Can you imagine how silly it would be if a book were published whose copyright included a restriction that the book could not be used by black people, or in a public library, or placed on the same shelf as a book by a different author? Imagine if a song were published under a restriction that it could not be played a station that also played a song by a competing musician, and that any other songs played by that station fell under the same restriction as the first song? Really, it's completely silly.
I've always found "use" restrictions very strange. See my previous paragraph. And I find it nothing short of mendacious that the FSF should claim their restrictions are anything but that. Yours is a very common sentiment, and I can certainly respect your feelings on this matter. A lot of people feel this way. That's why you so many licensing terms that in effect grant unlimited non-commercial use, but that for commercial use, you must contact the author to make other arrangements. I can hardly fault them too strongly for this, because I do hear what they're feeling. They've done their work for free, and they don't want people to get some benefit out their work which they themselves are not getting.According to the FSF, this is not free source, open software, or anything else you care to call it, because it's got anti-commercial restrictions. And then they tell you that their restrictions which bar anyone from using their software in what any businessman would be call a commercial sense (traditional fee-for-licence schemes) is not anti-commercial. Who but George Orwell could be so proud of the boldness of this spin job?
It would be more honest of the FSF to get out of the business of word games and related spin. But they are, fundamentally, a politico-economic foundation, not a technical one. They wish that all software were GPL'd, because they could thereby impose their morality upon others by the--what word do you want me to say here other than the completely honest "infective nature" or "viral nature"--perhaps "collateral damages", then--of the GPL.
I must confess that I have on a few occasions in the past, and doubtless several in the future, contemplated places where I would dearly delight in seeing the GPL installed and enforced. Oh, you do not know how sorely tempted I have been! One example is with Microsoft's operating systems products, because if they were court-ordered to slap the GPL on their OSes, that would be a likely end to their strategy of putatively "integrating" into the OS any application area that they care to monopolize.
But you know what? This is a personal weakness of mine, and I must overcome the urge. Tempting though it may sound, I must reject the temptation. I must. That's because it is fundamentally immoral to coerce others to behave in accord with your own sense of morality. It doesn't matter whether your morality happens to be the best around, or even the best there can ever be. Coercion is by its very nature by definition immoral. As with the paradox of having your cake and eating it too, morally you simply cannot enforce your own morality on others without sacrificing that very moral high ground which you would claim to occupy. Without free will, there can be no morality at all.
I have little doubt that, as you have written, "99% of the population [...] will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium [sic]". Does one care? Returning to Galileo, the whole world can jolly well stand up and claim that heavier things fall faster than lighter things, but does that in any fashion whatsoever alter the nature of reality? Of course not. They'd simply be wrong.
Majority rule is irrelevant in matters of pure, hard mathematics. You cannot lobby your way into changing the fundamental laws. You can only deceive yourself and others, as so many appear to have done. Reality ignores you. There is no vote. There is no court. And there is no appeal. Cold, stark reality is no democratic institution subject to the superstitious folly of one's fellow moron. Thank God.
But then again, why should we believe people who can't even manage to figure out how to spell millennium, let alone understand why that difference is critical for discerning years from asses? :-)
Per your perspicacious suggestion, gladly would I inquire of a newborn's mother whether her child was now in his zeroth or his first year of life. (Mothers are quite sensitive to these things, and it was clever of you to make you witty proposal.) The answer all would give, of course, is that on his first day of life, that newborn has also commenced his first year of the same. You know this is true. And if you do not, you have but to ask. Try your own experiment.
I should be further delighted to ask a mother of a child of 24 months how old her infant is, and whether he's about to celebrate his second or his third birthday. And I hope you're there with me, for then would you see that each and every one of these happy women would be quick to report that her child was about to celebrate the completion of his second year, and thus would be celebrating his "second birthday". And in all likelihood, not just a few of these fine mothers would quietly or unquietly consider you a touch daft that you would even begin to imagine holding a third birthday party at the end of only four and twenty tender months of life.
The inability to reason has never been a trait hard to find in the muddling masses. This millennial matter is merely yet another clear demonstration of their collective inability to grasp numbers--or, given the profligate orthographic transgressions as evinced by your own posting, words as well.
And remember: The world wouldn't need so many nitpickers if there weren't so damned many nitwits.
Translation in C, C++, Java, or Javascript is left for as an exercise for the reader, but approaches the trivial.
Yes, it's possible they'll just use it without thinking, and yes, that's what got us into this mess. But if they use it without thinking, we'll be fine. And if they do think about it, then that's at least a step in the right direction.
Here's a couple questions for you: considering the struct tm's definition of tm_year in so many languages
The reason that I believe Microsoft could crack the GPL like an eggshell is because I saw how they castrated POSIX. If they can do that, what do you think they can do to anybody, anywhere, any time? Yes, I believe that the GPL's infinite infection attributes are ignorant of copyright case law and wouldn't stand up based on that. And I've shown how GPL'd libraries no longer exist for purposes of linking. But the real source of my comment is that I believe Microsoft could disregard the GPL if they wanted to. And I doubt you want to see that.
I'm not sure this rampant innumeracy is as annoying the rampant illiteracy of the Thousand Asses: