In anycase, the problem doesn't have to be simply "misplacing the code". What if company C forks P (creating P') and adds new killer feature F to it? Nobody has that source code either
Wrong. The owner has that code. He may do wiht him as he wishes. You have no right to coerce him into giving away his work product for free.
Your rights stop with your code, and do not extend to others' code. You can say anything you want about your code, but no more.
just why can't the BSD license be withdrawn from P? Since "[t]he source is available for you to do whatsover you please with it", what's to stop me from take large (not to say full) portions and incorporate them into my own, non-free application?
Irrelevant. That's your code then. It's free for the using. The original didn't die. Do what you want with it. There's nothing wrong with using something that's free to make something that isn't. IT DOES NOT HURT YOU. It's no skin off your nose. Your stuff is still free.
There's some fundamental misunderstanding here. No one has any charity anymore. Just give it away. Stop hoarding. Stop telling people what rules there are. Remove the rules and free the software.
. Your statement: "Once something is placed under the BSDL, that code remains forever free." is demonstrably false
Your statement is pure FUD. Something that's BSDL'd is certainly free, and you cannot change that. The licence cannot be post facto withdrawn from the software freed by the BSDL. The source is available for you to do whatsover you please with it. Your scenario of everybody misplacing all copies is stupid.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to own your own efforts later, but this is of no consequence in a licence that is designed to be non-viral.
Oh don't be lame. You're saying that you misplaced all copies of the source code, and now the last person with a copy won't give it to you? That's ridiculous.
Once something is placed under the BSDL, that code remains forever free. However, this is not a prurient licence, and makes no claims on anyone else's code. It plays well and gets along with others.
I swear, there must be something in the water up there in Boston. I think Neal Stephenson's Zodiac was right.
First, why do you care about binary compatibility? Down that route lie viruses. Unix is a source compatible system, and is stronger because of that.
Secondly, when you say "emulation", it's not like a Sparc emulating an Intel. All it does is revector the syscalls to pretend there's a kernel there with a different idea of what goes where. It still runs at full speed. This isn't like binary emulation at all. It's not that big a deal.
Re:A lot of people seem to misunderstand the GPL.
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RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 2
Note, the BSD license doesn't give this protection.
Wrong. The GPL doesn't give the freedoms that the BSD licence does. The GPL is constantly concerned that someone, somewhere might be coding for profit instead of giving away their labours. The BSDL doesn't fricking care about what others do. It only cares about its own source. Something that's BSD licensed is forever free.
On the other hand, anything that's GPL'd is forever coercive. And, like homeopathy, no matter how many millions of times you dilute a piece of it with the fruits of your own labours, it retains its 100% potency.
At least, that's what they would have you believe. Of course, this is untested. This strange action at a distance is something even Einstein would doubt, not to mention any judge. The theory is unsupported in any other intellectual property case law.
If people do not wish to help me, that too is their choice, and I would never dream of compelling them to do something against their wills. They own their code, and I own my code. Very simple stuff.
Your choice: forever free, or forever coercive. I know what my choice is: if people wish to help me, that's their choice. That's immoral in my universe.
If people do not wish to help me, that too is their choice, and I would never dream of compelling them to do something against their wills. They own their code, and I own my code. Very simple stuff. Their additions are their work, not mine. Far be it from me to claim otherwise.
As I recall there was plenty of public domain software around when RMS started the FSF, and you didn't have to buy into his political/social movement to use it, and you could do anything you damn well pleased with it. Now all people do is argue about license terms.
YES! This is really important. We have a lot less free software now than we used to. The licence bickering is nutty. People used to be a lot more generous. Now, they're all money obsessed, either pro or con.
But um, perhaps you might express these thoughts in another thread?:-)
Witness the fate of the BSD's - originally compatible due to their shared code base in BSD4.4, presently incompatible due to different directions in development. And that over a relatively short time span.
Are you honestly that misinformed, or are you just trolling for a bite? Whatever the case, direct empirical evidence indicates--at least to me--that you're wrong. I smell the FUDge factor here.
What evidence? The evidence is that I have never once had a problem compiling the very same program between both OpenBSD/Sparc and FreeBSD/Intel. Am I just lucky? Are you just unlucky? Are you really sure about what you just said? Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, and hterefore everything keeps coming out right--or maybe your statement needs retraction or amplification.
Yes, let's nominate the pope and insult about 4/5 of the world's population. I can't think of anything more stupid than choosing a religious leader.
Rubbish! Shall we then dishonor the billions of theists by selecting an a-theist?
Irrespective of the achievements of the current Bishop of Rome, your statement's overreaching implications are patently ridiculous. To assume that a man who holds some sort of spiritual position is ipso facto disqualified from temporal recognition is itself the more insulting of the two choices. If a man does great things, it matters not what ice cream flavor he might prefer.
Spain does not hesitate to honor its Christian, Jewish, Moslem, and Roman countrymen. Go to Córdoba; go to Toledo. Observe the statuary and respect. Why should we be any less respectful than they are?
Thinking of what you do with a paltry two-bit interface saddled with inefficient seek latencies, imagine what you could do wit a ten-bit one that's distance optimized to decrease seek time. Mr Rogers says, "Can you say fatter pipe, boys and girls?":-)
Thinking of what you can do with your eyes constantly switching between screen and keyboard, think now what you could do if you could leave your brain in the virtual world displayed on the screen and never have to look down.
Yes, fracturing is bad. Just look at what happened to the Unix of old, with millions of forks. (No, I'm not talking about fork(2):-) In the Freenix world today, look now at the dissent between the BSD and the Linux camps. Look at the hundredfold, massivly disorganized, subtly variant Linux-based operating systems and the skirmishes and name-calling that ensue amidst them.
These incessant internecine squabbles are not only completely self-destructive; they also obliterate our reputation in the world beyond our little community. They make us look like whining children, not measured adults. We become our own worst enemies. We discredit ourselves and all we do before the serious business community, as well as before the scientific one.
Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.
Your point has genuine merit. Let's look at real-world cases that might apply.
The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.
Two critical questions are:
What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?
I think these two cases are worth looking at because they did not start with GPL'd software, and thus were free to create a traditional fee-for-licence business model for their software systems. Are your points cited above relevant to them? Do companies like that matter to free software--and if so, do they help or hinder it? Or is that too facile a question; perhaps they help some things, hinder others?
To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.
Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!
If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.
Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.
My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)
Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?
For those of you who are thinking about speech as the interface of the future, doubtless you are correct for some cases. However, there will always be a place for precision work. Think about CAD programs. Can you imagine just speaking to them and getting the accuracy you need? Plus, until we have programming languages that are redesigned not to use punctuation that need be spoken, you'll be able to enter your code much easily with a keyboard.
Hmmm... I think you really do lose some of the power if the interface isn't perfect... example: make menuconfig is *far* more navigable and easy to use than make xconfig. hands stay on keyboard - tab, space, enter, and the up/down arrows are all you need to *quickly* get around (and F1 is close for descriptions). xconfig doesn't allow you to scroll through choices with the arrow keys - you *need* to use the mouse. That alone slows things up considerably...
Sounds like you could have been a signatory to my Extreme Keyboarding article.:-)
You cannot catch the Stallman virus simply from writing code that conforms to an API that happens to have a GPL'd instantiation. If that were the case, then a script or program (call it "Mom") that calls a GPL'd script or program (call it "Dick") would be itself GPL'd. Moreover, any other scripts or programs (call it "Jane") that "Mom" calls from the same place that she calls "Dick" would themselves be free of contamination.
As you see, mere aggregation with the infected Jack does not pass the virus back up to Mom, nor over to his sister Jane. Aggregation does not infect. This is true whether Dick and Jane are programs, or whether they are libraries. It doesn't matter. I'll say it once more for the logic-impaired: Aggregation does not infect. Otherwise they are trying to dictate what is or is not legitimate use. Copyright law does not permit this.
If the FSF shows up to break your kneecaps, as another poster semi-amusingly seemed to imply might happen, and so you feel need a more legalistic way around this library infection issue, here's why you're safe.
It's time to let go of your fear. The virus doesn't transmit across library aggregation. The reign of terror is ended, and the black death is put back into its bottle. You are now free. Code in peace.
Does [a-z] catch e with a grave/aigu? Does [d-e]? Does [e-f]?
RESPONSE
No, not really, although that certainly has been discussed.g I think what you want is/[[:alpha:]]/, which only works in the very latest release. Otherwise, you'll need to use the use locale pragma (which doesn't refer to a salad dressing, actually:-) in conjunction with something like/\w/ or/[^\W\d_]/, and maybe a call to the POSIX::setlocale as well.
SEE ALSO
perlre(1), perllocale(1), perldelta(1), perlsec(1), and utf8(3),
EXAMPLES
[Following in an excerpt from the 5.005_63 release of Perl's
perlre(1) manpage. --tchrist]
The POSIX character class syntax, [:class:], is also available. The available classes and their backslash equivalents (if available) are as follows:
For example use [:upper:] to match all the uppercase characters. Note that the [] are part of the [::] construct, not part of the whole character class. For example: [01[:alpha:]%] matches one, zero, any alphabetic character, and the percentage sign.
If the utf8 pragma is used, the following equivalences to Unicode \p{} constructs hold:
For example [:lower:] and \p{IsLower} are equivalent.
If the utf8 pragma is not used but the locale pragma is, the classes correlate with the isalpha(3) interface (except for `word', which is a Perl extension, mirroring \w).
The assumedly non-obviously named classes are:
cntrl: Any control character. Usually characters that don't produce output as such but instead control the terminal somehow: for example newline and backspace are control characters. All characters with ord() less than 32 are most often control classified as characters.
graph: Any alphanumeric or punctuation character.
print: Any alphanumeric or punctuation character or space.
punct: Any punctuation character.
xdigit: Any hexadecimal digit. Though this may feel silly (/0-9a-f/i would work just fine) it is included for completeness.
You can negate the [::] character classes by prefixing the class name with a '^'. This is a Perl extension. For example:
I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the so-called `goodware' movement. I am the founding father of `Good Software' movement, which is completely different.
do you understand the problem of address aliasing and how it affects what code optimizations can and cannot be done by a compiler? People that use FORTRAN do so for a reason.
It's remarkable what kind of thing a truly good Fortran compiler can do. For example, a really good one can even detect subtly illegal code due to overlapping arrays.
In November 1990, CONVEX Computer Corp. announced its new applications compiler, giving substantial credit to the compiler group at Rice for ideas underlying the system. The Convex applications compiler analyzes and transforms whole programs to eliminate errors and improve execution efficiency. The underlying implementation technology, called "interprocedural analysis and optimization," was first implemented in a practical compilation system in the ParaScope programming environment by researchers at Rice.
A few commercial parallelizing compilers have initial interprocedural analysis systems. Most notably, the Convex Applications Compiler performs flow-insensitive array analysis and interprocedural constant propagation and obtains some path-specific information through inlining and procedure cloning Applied Parallel Research has demonstrated good speedup results on some of the programs presented here; these programs were parallelized with programmer directives that instruct the compiler to ignore dependences and to privatize certain variables. We know of no commercial system that currently employs any flow-sensitive array analysis, particularly interprocedural array privatization.
There may well be two definitions of free. That's irrelevant. When RMS uses the word, he means neither of those definitions. If it were free, there would be no strings attached. He's just co-opted a friendly word and given it a new, RMS-defined meaning to tell a half-truth--what Heinlein referred to as artful lying.
I could say more about the intentional deception, but you should just laugh instead.
Re:In defence of Gore, Prescriptivism(standards)
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Tales From The Bazaar
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· Score: 2
It sounds like we're in violent agreement.
Gosh, I just hate it when that happens.:-)
I was attacking McCullagh/Wired for their attack on Gore's saying "rooter".
Whoops, you just blew it again.:-) I don't know what it would mean for Gore to say "rooter". Remember that in my dialect, we say [rUt], so that must be a ['rU *R], presumably someone digging up taters or some such, rhyming--in some sense--with "gooder" ['gU *R]. I suppose you might be meaning ['ru tR] instead, but that's hardly obvious to me. This is the fundamental problem that IPA attempts to address.
BTW, I think coming up with unambiguous and obvious ways to convey pronounciation in ascii is a wonderful challenge. ASCII IPA is nice, but fails the obviousness test.
IPA is rough enough, and I agree that ASCII IPA is imperfect, but I don't know how to fix it without bumping into the "rooter" problem you tripped on above. Then again, I've been used to regular IPA for going on twenty years, so it's not a big jump. And it's far better than the pseudo-pronouncing things ("Just say it like you say BLAH") you see most people give on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
Your rights stop with your code, and do not extend to others' code. You can say anything you want about your code, but no more.
Free code has no restrictions.
There's some fundamental misunderstanding here. No one has any charity anymore. Just give it away. Stop hoarding. Stop telling people what rules there are. Remove the rules and free the software.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to own your own efforts later, but this is of no consequence in a licence that is designed to be non-viral.
Once something is placed under the BSDL, that code remains forever free. However, this is not a prurient licence, and makes no claims on anyone else's code. It plays well and gets along with others.
I swear, there must be something in the water up there in Boston. I think Neal Stephenson's Zodiac was right.
Secondly, when you say "emulation", it's not like a Sparc emulating an Intel. All it does is revector the syscalls to pretend there's a kernel there with a different idea of what goes where. It still runs at full speed. This isn't like binary emulation at all. It's not that big a deal.
On the other hand, anything that's GPL'd is forever coercive. And, like homeopathy, no matter how many millions of times you dilute a piece of it with the fruits of your own labours, it retains its 100% potency.
At least, that's what they would have you believe. Of course, this is untested. This strange action at a distance is something even Einstein would doubt, not to mention any judge. The theory is unsupported in any other intellectual property case law.
If people do not wish to help me, that too is their choice, and I would never dream of compelling them to do something against their wills. They own their code, and I own my code. Very simple stuff.
Your choice: forever free, or forever coercive. I know what my choice is: if people wish to help me, that's their choice. That's immoral in my universe.
If people do not wish to help me, that too is their choice, and I would never dream of compelling them to do something against their wills. They own their code, and I own my code. Very simple stuff. Their additions are their work, not mine. Far be it from me to claim otherwise.
But um, perhaps you might express these thoughts in another thread? :-)
What evidence? The evidence is that I have never once had a problem compiling the very same program between both OpenBSD/Sparc and FreeBSD/Intel. Am I just lucky? Are you just unlucky? Are you really sure about what you just said? Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, and hterefore everything keeps coming out right--or maybe your statement needs retraction or amplification.
Irrespective of the achievements of the current Bishop of Rome, your statement's overreaching implications are patently ridiculous. To assume that a man who holds some sort of spiritual position is ipso facto disqualified from temporal recognition is itself the more insulting of the two choices. If a man does great things, it matters not what ice cream flavor he might prefer.
Spain does not hesitate to honor its Christian, Jewish, Moslem, and Roman countrymen. Go to Córdoba; go to Toledo. Observe the statuary and respect. Why should we be any less respectful than they are?
Thinking of what you can do with your eyes constantly switching between screen and keyboard, think now what you could do if you could leave your brain in the virtual world displayed on the screen and never have to look down.
These incessant internecine squabbles are not only completely self-destructive; they also obliterate our reputation in the world beyond our little community. They make us look like whining children, not measured adults. We become our own worst enemies. We discredit ourselves and all we do before the serious business community, as well as before the scientific one.
With the support of neither, we die.
The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.
Two critical questions are:
- What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
- If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?
I think these two cases are worth looking at because they did not start with GPL'd software, and thus were free to create a traditional fee-for-licence business model for their software systems. Are your points cited above relevant to them? Do companies like that matter to free software--and if so, do they help or hinder it? Or is that too facile a question; perhaps they help some things, hinder others?To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.
Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!
If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.
Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.
My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)
Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?
For those of you who are thinking about speech as the interface of the future, doubtless you are correct for some cases. However, there will always be a place for precision work. Think about CAD programs. Can you imagine just speaking to them and getting the accuracy you need? Plus, until we have programming languages that are redesigned not to use punctuation that need be spoken, you'll be able to enter your code much easily with a keyboard.
The GPL already damages the community. The proof is simple and compelling: look at the dissent it sews.
Rich was an icon. You should respect him for his virtuoso command of Unix, not denigrate him for his avoidance of things Microsoft.
Shame on you, you miserable Redmond worm.
As you see, mere aggregation with the infected Jack does not pass the virus back up to Mom, nor over to his sister Jane. Aggregation does not infect. This is true whether Dick and Jane are programs, or whether they are libraries. It doesn't matter. I'll say it once more for the logic-impaired: Aggregation does not infect. Otherwise they are trying to dictate what is or is not legitimate use. Copyright law does not permit this.
If the FSF shows up to break your kneecaps, as another poster semi-amusingly seemed to imply might happen, and so you feel need a more legalistic way around this library infection issue, here's why you're safe.
It's time to let go of your fear. The virus doesn't transmit across library aggregation. The reign of terror is ended, and the black death is put back into its bottle. You are now free. Code in peace.
RESPONSE
SEE ALSO
EXAMPLES SIGNATUREHere are two references:
I could say more about the intentional deception, but you should just laugh instead.
Please use ASCII IPA to describe the pronunciations you intend. I can't make heads or tails out of what you're saying.