I hesitated about commenting on it, because it makes me sound like a picky little besserwisser (spelling?), but:
"the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around" is a flawed statement, or rather, "intellectual property" is a word which doesn't well describe what you probably mean.
First of all, the term accepts the premise that products of the intellect (ideas, code etc) can be owned, which is precisely what the spirit of the GPL is against. It's true that the copyleft strategy relies on copyright, but in the ideal GNU world (not necessarily what I or you think of as ideal, but anyway) there would be no copyright for products of the intellect, such as software.
Furthermore, "intellectual property" is used to bundle stuff like copyright, patents and trademarks together, and the GPL is only concerned with copyright. Well, actually to a limited extent patents too in that they must be royalty-free or nonexistent for stuff covered by the (L)GPL.
Anyway, I don't mean to attack you, or say that you are stupid (as RMS has the habit of saying to people who use the term), just a friendly pointer:) Obviously, the FSF has something to say about it too -- http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# IntellectualProperty.
I mean _use_ of the _software_, just what I said. All the restrictions imposed and rights granted by the GPL is on redistribution of the program, and it's source code. But you're right in that "using" source code may be interpreted as incorporating it into other works, and there are no resitrictions on doing that, until you _distribute_ it.
It's all just a load of semantics and meaning, so how you put it isn't really that important as long as it isn't misleading.
Only glanced at the link... it's about violating the copyright of music! The analogy to software would be if I read the source to GNU readline, put it away and start writing my own GUH-NU readline. It wouldn't be a violation of the GPL, or of anything else for that matter, unless someone can show that non-trivial code is the same in the two implementations. Even if they do the exact same thing, it's AOK. The only thing that can stop you from doing this sort of thing is software patents, which is a completely other story, and certainly a Bad Thing(tm).
The meaning of the LGPL has been changed, and that means the license in every LGPLed package everywhere requires that the user adhere to different rules.
As I said, my post didn't really have anything to do with this Java+LGPL situation. But if you're referring to the fact that the FSF can release new versions of the LGPL, well then you are plain wrong. The LGPL states that you can chose to follow the terms of this version or (at your option) any later version. So the idea that some people seem to have that the FSF can just release a new version of a license and everyone has to obide by it is... plain wrong.
Anyway, I'm unsure if I understand what you are referring too, so I may be grossly OT again. And no, I didn't read the artivle:)
Please, why do we need to hear these words in relation to the (L)GPL? Apart from the fact that they have a very negative tone, they don't even properly describe the nature of the GPL.
There are few ways you could _accidently_ end up in a situation where your code is in violation of the GPL (i.e. a situation where you are required to release your code under the GPL or remove GPLd parts of it). Of course, if you don't know what you're doing you could use for example GNU readline for your program and not discover until the end of development that you are required to distribute your program (a derivative work in legal code) under the terms of the GPL, but since when does negligence make something viral?
If something were viral, you could end up "catching" it even if you didn't want to, but the only way to get yourself into a situation where your code must be distributed under the GPL is if you want that to happen, or if you don't bother checking the terms of use+distribution of the software you're using.
A better word might be "self-propagating". Technically it is of course developers using GPLd code who propagate the license, but that's just semantics.
As you know, there are _no_ restrictions of using GPLd software, so there's no risk of "infection" there.
[end rant mode]
I'm not saying here that everyone who doesn't understand the GPL is an idiot and deserves to have their code affected, only that viral is an inappropriate word.
As for the LGPL+Java thing, well my post has nothing to do with it:)
My first reaction was "oh, forking is bad, we don't need another". But in truth, this is no more remarkable than the fact that there are 100s if not 1000s of different flavors of GNU/Linux.
I believe he's referring to the fact that it would be quite possible to set up a kiddie porn ring of something in freenet, and it would be near impossible to get hold of the criminals.
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network. First and foremost it's a medium which guarantees your anonymity, which makes it great for organizing a political movement in an oppressive regime and other things. But it's equally "useful" for doing things coveretly which most of us are disgusted by.
And child pornography is well beyond horrible, don't you think?
Your arguments are probably true -- I wouldn't know because I've never worked selling and/or developing software.
However, it's unreasonable to only think about what buisneses need/want when discussing software licenses or whatever, because buisness isn't everything. Personally, I couldn't care less how the software licenses I chose appeal to CEO's and other buisnes-people.
The people I'd want to appeal to with my code/application is normal people -- to let them know that it's OK for them to share the software with whoever they want, and I won't call them pirate or accuse them of stealing. I might achieve this with "freeware" as well, but I'd also value feedback and help from people who _are_ programmers. Hence, for me, free software licenses (read: the (L)GPL) is the right choice. I don't care what Tim O'Reilly says (I didn't read the article either, so perhaps this is all terribly off topic).
Actually, DRI support stops at 9200 at the moment. I know this because I'm using the DRI drivers with that card myself. On a side note, I bought the card for the sole reason that it would allow me to have 3D acceleration using only Free Software. Before I had an NVidia card, and hence no 3D (unless one is willing to use proprietary drivers, but who is? *cough*).
I think probably there will be DRI support for cards higher than 9200 in the future, although I'm not sure why I think this.
1000 people isn't very impressive. Dreamhack, Sweden has 5000 twice a year (I was one of the 5000 a few weeks ago). And later this summer there's another LANparty in the south of Sweden -- Gamehalla -- which is supposed to have 5400 or something.
I'll be impressed when there's a 10.000-person LANparty. Not that I see the point of that many people, but anyway.
OK, so there will be some encryption incompatibility in future versions of whatever proprietary Zip-compression applications? Who cares I say.
It's time for Zip to die. tar+gzip compresses better, and tar+bzip2 still better. Guess the only reason it lives is because of the network effect -- because "everyone" has it, even project admins who realize Zip is crappy make zip packages alongside their tar.{gz,bz2} packages.
Disclaimer: No, I didn't read the article, I'm just ranting.
I can't say I'm surprised such observations can be made. Nor am I upset about it. People will gain the skills they require, and if being able to write by hand legibly isn't a must we simply won't be very good at it. I expect that making words stick will be done by other methods than pencil and paper in the future, and the ability to write will be no more a requirement than it is for us to manouver a horse today.
Perhaps in a few decades writing by hand will be more of an art-form than something everyone needs to do.
I'm sorry, but I truly don't care. There are other uses for PNG than websites, and one can use PNG images without transparency too. An I'll admit that even if I did make a website with some transparent images, I'd use PNG anyway, because it's not important to me to please everyone -- especially not IE-users:)
Patented or not, GIF is an antiquated compression algorithm which performs quite poorly compared to PNG. There is descent browser support for PNG, and it can also do some nifty things which GIF cannot -- most importantly alpha transparency as opposed to binary transparency.
It seems most people just don't care enough to use PNG though, so I wouldn't expect it to take over the net very soon.
When there's too much on your hard drive... your computer will run slower, your computer will crash more often...
Wow, I wonder what sort of system this guy could be running. Crash more often -- am I the only one who expects my software to not crash, no matter what (although admittedly it has on two occasions the last year:P ) ?
Nice to hear someone with a clue speak about Free Software and the GNU project for a change. For reasons that aren't terribly easy to grok, RMS keeps telling people not to use the term intellectual property, so you might want to read that too:)
To the extent that I can see, that term isn't very good, because it accepts the premise that thoughts, ideas and concepts can be owned, which many believe shouldn't be possible, me included. There are other reasons to, so read the link.
I actually believe the GPL allows coders to, for example, mandate certain short messages be displayed on their progs...e.g., the Vi message about helping children...
No, actually that isn't true. From section 6 of the GPL: ... to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Hence you may not add requirements about what sort of notices are displayed, because that is in effect restricting the user to not modifying the program in a certain way. (On a side note, it's not allowed to remove copyright notices printed by an interactive program, but that's another issue). I guess maybe what you're thinking about is the invariant sections allowed by the GNU FDL (Free Documentaion License). These may not be changed, but must deal with things of personal or political nature which does not deal with the subject matter of the main part of the document (this has been misunderstood, hehe).
They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
... If a corporation has code which they recieved under the GPL in a product of theirs which they distribute and someone found out, then they'd be in a bit of trouble. What would happen is that since the corporation is distributing under a non-GPL license, their rights to the GPLd code automatically becomes null and void, and they can chose, as you say to either comply completely with the GPL, or remove the code in question.
Recall however that the same code can be distributed under many different licenses if the copyright holders want to, so me licensing a few hundred lines of my (no one elses!) code to you under the GPL doesn't mean that I can't use that code in my proprietary software product. So if SCO's code has gotten into the kernel and they accidently redistribute it (which I understand isn't the case, but let's pretend) the only legal effect would be that that precise code is now under the GPL. But if someone has taken SCO's code unlicensed (don't say steal) and put it into the kernel, then that person is not the copyright holder of that code, and could not place it under the GPL in the first place. As a consequence, the GPL for that code is again null and void, and it would have to be removed from the kernel.
If software patents are involved... well I don't know. Just recall that the GPL requires any patents on code to be licensed to all third parties for any use at no royalty-fee, so if SCO has distributed GPLd code for which they hold patents and don't allow this, then once again the license becomes void, and removing the affected code should be the solution.
Don't trust my word for it though, I don't really know what sort of claims SCO are making (can't be bothered to read all these articles), so the situation may be somewhat different
I tried gentoo for a few days between Slackware and Debian, and found myself throwing it out, well, within a few days. It wasn't because it wasnt' nifty, not because it didn't work as expected.
The problem I found myself battling was how to not install non-free software. When I had most things installed, I thought it would be a good time to install MPlayer too. On Slackware I'd always avoided the win32-codecs, because I simply don't want to use non-free software (if the option is not watching the video and using non-free stuff, I chose not watching).
Anyway, when emerging MPlayer, the emerge system started downloading these wretched w32-codecs, and I thought WTF?! Asking about in #gentoo I found out I had to remove the win32-codecs from the emerge script. OK, so I did that. The next thing was OpenOffice, which suddenly wanted to install Blackdown Java, which also qualifies as non-free. It wouldn't have been much trouble fixing that either, but if I have to read all the emerge scripts to make sure nothing non-free is installed (and also figure out what actually is non-free), I'm not not going to have much fun with gentoo.
If someone wants to use non-free software on their computer, I'm not going to be a total bitch about it (although I'd reccomend against it), but for my computer, it should be my choise. I filed a bug-report, and found out that there was an environment var ACCEPT_LICENSES, but that there was no code behind it yet. Very well I thought, I'll just use a (the) distro that makes it easy for me to use only free software, and that is what I do today (debian)
I saw the anouncement that someone had begun implementing Theora playback in Xine a while ago. I've been playing with theora, encoding whatever I could find. I find that the quality of Theora is quite good, but it consumes a lot of CPU when decoding. Perhaps in Xine, playback is less CPU-demanding (I can't image example_player was optimized).
(On a side note: it was fun encoding First Contact as theora -- it required 90GB of temporary space, and I watched it only by changing the resolution close to the width of encoded video)
Now I can encode to Theora and compare in fullscreen! Yipee! I hope the beta isn't too far away, so more people will dare check it out, so it can eventually gain the same momentum that Vorbis has now.
Granted, for a while MPlayer was better than Xine in terms of performance, support for different codecs etc. Performance is still better I should guess, but I haven't really tried. And yes, MPlayer can play that severely broken fsfawards2001.vob.
However, look inside of MPlayer and you'll see that everything isn't as perfect. Everything is joined as one package -- gui built together with the rest of the code. No possibility of turning deinterlacing on and off during playback, or even toggling it with a gui.
Enter Xine: libxine takes care of decoding buisness and talks to the output mechanisms (oss+xv in my case). It doesn't provide even a text-interface. All interface is done by xine-ui, gxine, kxine and some other alternatives. Take a pick.
You may say that how it works inside is irrelevant, but I (being half-and-half a programmer) sure don't agree. As things grow, having clearly definied roles for each component will help avoid the tangled up state MPlayer is in. This is why the original developer of MPlayer left the project a while back ago, and then a little later said he was going to start libmplayer, which doesn't provide any gui or anything. Sound familiar?
Oh, and in case it was a long time since you tried Xine, try again -- it's improved quite alot.
Opera 6.0
I can't get my hands on a license without downloading the software:(
RealPlayer
The same thing. They obviously don't want us to read it unecessarily:)
Flash
You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the Software, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the Software to a human-perceivable form.
That's more clear cut, and straight out said than in most licenses:) ...
You may not modify the Software or create derivative works based upon the Software. ...
You may not export the Software into any country prohibited by the United States Export Administration Act and the regulations thereunder. Which I guess means that Cubans, Lybians, Iranians, North Koreans, Syrians and some others can't use the software, but I may well be wrong as for which nationalities this is.
Java
Except as specifically authorized in any Supplemental License Terms, you may not make copies of Software, other than a single copy of Software for archival purposes. Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software. ...
You may not modify the Java Platform Interface ("JPI", identified as classes contained within the "java" package or any subpackages of the "java" package), by creating additional classes within the JPI or otherwise causing the addition to or modification of the classes in the JPI. ...
You acknowledge that the Software may automatically download, install, and execute applets, applications, software extensions, and updated versions of the Software from Sun ("Software Updates")
NVidia drivers ... SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files). ...
Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code.
As you see, the licenses limit the terms of use , modification and redistribuation of the software in ways which are to me not acceptable.
Re:What I would like to know.
on
Libranet 2.8 Review
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The reason is quite simple. As a Free Software follower, I don't want to use any software which doesn't give the freedoms/rights I want for myself and everyone else.
In less abstract terms: I don't want to agree to Reals license agreements or use their software, because it doesn't allow to do the things I should be allowed to do: study how it works, make changes to it and distribute derivative works (I would need the source code, and permission to use it for this to be possible). If you hang on a while I'll post another reply with some extracts from some of the EULAs.
I frequently get bashed here at slashdot for saying such things, but if don't have any control over the software (i.e. it's proprietary and/or non-free), then I don't want to use it -- no matter how good it is. If you want to know some of the reasons why non-free software is bad then go read up on GNU's philosophy section. Even if you find you don't agree with the GNU philosophy, you should know about it, because any GNU/Linux system (including Libranet) is build on and with GNU tools (and a lot of other of course, GNU should'nt be getting all the credit).
Does anyone know if Libranet categorizes software into main, contrib and non-free so that one could easily avoid the non-free things the reviewer mentions:
* Opera 6.0 * RealPlayer * Flash (could be a free version?) * Java (perhaps not the non-free one either?) * MS TrueType fonts * NVidia 3d accelerated drivers for X
He says "Libranet is 100% compatible with Debian" so I guess one could remove the non-free sources from sources.list?
What I think you're failing to see is that there is a very good reason that you must assign copyright to the FSF when you contribute to some of the GNU projects. Should there ever be a legal situation where someone violates the GPL of say GCC by distributing a modified version under a non-free license, the FSF would probably want to take legal action. To do so, it's important that they have the copyright on it all, or all parties who have contributed would have to join in. From the GNU website (http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_5.html):
If you maintain an FSF-copyrighted package, then you should follow certain legal procedures when incorporating legally significant changes written by other people. This ensures that the FSF has the legal right to distribute the package, and the standing to defend its GPL-covered status in court if necessary.
In other words, it isn't so much an ego-thing for the FSF/GNU, as a practical consideration. Note that there have been historically situations where a contribution made by an entity without assigning copyright has lead to the end of a project. I believe this happened to the original Emacs implementation, and caused RMS to start over implementing it in C. I think this may be one of the reasons he devised the GPL too. Admittedly, it wasn't really an identical situation (different license all together), but it gives you some idea why it might be good idea to control your work.
As for all your conspiracy theories, I _would_ trust the FSF with my code -- there's no guarantee that the FSF won't become a distributor of non-free software, but I think everyone agrees that's _highly_ unlikely, no?
Slashdot Mirror
I hesitated about commenting on it, because it makes me sound like a picky little besserwisser (spelling?), but:
:) Obviously, the FSF has something to say about it too -- http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# IntellectualProperty.
"the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around" is a flawed statement, or rather, "intellectual property" is a word which doesn't well describe what you probably mean.
First of all, the term accepts the premise that products of the intellect (ideas, code etc) can be owned, which is precisely what the spirit of the GPL is against. It's true that the copyleft strategy relies on copyright, but in the ideal GNU world (not necessarily what I or you think of as ideal, but anyway) there would be no copyright for products of the intellect, such as software.
Furthermore, "intellectual property" is used to bundle stuff like copyright, patents and trademarks together, and the GPL is only concerned with copyright. Well, actually to a limited extent patents too in that they must be royalty-free or nonexistent for stuff covered by the (L)GPL.
Anyway, I don't mean to attack you, or say that you are stupid (as RMS has the habit of saying to people who use the term), just a friendly pointer
I mean _use_ of the _software_, just what I said. All the restrictions imposed and rights granted by the GPL is on redistribution of the program, and it's source code. But you're right in that "using" source code may be interpreted as incorporating it into other works, and there are no resitrictions on doing that, until you _distribute_ it.
It's all just a load of semantics and meaning, so how you put it isn't really that important as long as it isn't misleading.
Only glanced at the link... it's about violating the copyright of music! The analogy to software would be if I read the source to GNU readline, put it away and start writing my own GUH-NU readline. It wouldn't be a violation of the GPL, or of anything else for that matter, unless someone can show that non-trivial code is the same in the two implementations. Even if they do the exact same thing, it's AOK. The only thing that can stop you from doing this sort of thing is software patents, which is a completely other story, and certainly a Bad Thing(tm).
As I said, my post didn't really have anything to do with this Java+LGPL situation. But if you're referring to the fact that the FSF can release new versions of the LGPL, well then you are plain wrong. The LGPL states that you can chose to follow the terms of this version or (at your option) any later version. So the idea that some people seem to have that the FSF can just release a new version of a license and everyone has to obide by it is... plain wrong.
Anyway, I'm unsure if I understand what you are referring too, so I may be grossly OT again. And no, I didn't read the artivle :)
Please, why do we need to hear these words in relation to the (L)GPL? Apart from the fact that they have a very negative tone, they don't even properly describe the nature of the GPL.
:)
There are few ways you could _accidently_ end up in a situation where your code is in violation of the GPL (i.e. a situation where you are required to release your code under the GPL or remove GPLd parts of it). Of course, if you don't know what you're doing you could use for example GNU readline for your program and not discover until the end of development that you are required to distribute your program (a derivative work in legal code) under the terms of the GPL, but since when does negligence make something viral?
If something were viral, you could end up "catching" it even if you didn't want to, but the only way to get yourself into a situation where your code must be distributed under the GPL is if you want that to happen, or if you don't bother checking the terms of use+distribution of the software you're using.
A better word might be "self-propagating". Technically it is of course developers using GPLd code who propagate the license, but that's just semantics.
As you know, there are _no_ restrictions of using GPLd software, so there's no risk of "infection" there.
[end rant mode]
I'm not saying here that everyone who doesn't understand the GPL is an idiot and deserves to have their code affected, only that viral is an inappropriate word.
As for the LGPL+Java thing, well my post has nothing to do with it
My first reaction was "oh, forking is bad, we don't need another". But in truth, this is no more remarkable than the fact that there are 100s if not 1000s of different flavors of GNU/Linux.
So there.
I believe he's referring to the fact that it would be quite possible to set up a kiddie porn ring of something in freenet, and it would be near impossible to get hold of the criminals.
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network. First and foremost it's a medium which guarantees your anonymity, which makes it great for organizing a political movement in an oppressive regime and other things. But it's equally "useful" for doing things coveretly which most of us are disgusted by.
And child pornography is well beyond horrible, don't you think?
Your arguments are probably true -- I wouldn't know because I've never worked selling and/or developing software.
However, it's unreasonable to only think about what buisneses need/want when discussing software licenses or whatever, because buisness isn't everything. Personally, I couldn't care less how the software licenses I chose appeal to CEO's and other buisnes-people.
The people I'd want to appeal to with my code/application is normal people -- to let them know that it's OK for them to share the software with whoever they want, and I won't call them pirate or accuse them of stealing. I might achieve this with "freeware" as well, but I'd also value feedback and help from people who _are_ programmers. Hence, for me, free software licenses (read: the (L)GPL) is the right choice. I don't care what Tim O'Reilly says (I didn't read the article either, so perhaps this is all terribly off topic).
Actually, DRI support stops at 9200 at the moment. I know this because I'm using the DRI drivers with that card myself. On a side note, I bought the card for the sole reason that it would allow me to have 3D acceleration using only Free Software. Before I had an NVidia card, and hence no 3D (unless one is willing to use proprietary drivers, but who is? *cough*).
I think probably there will be DRI support for cards higher than 9200 in the future, although I'm not sure why I think this.
1000 people isn't very impressive. Dreamhack, Sweden has 5000 twice a year (I was one of the 5000 a few weeks ago). And later this summer there's another LANparty in the south of Sweden -- Gamehalla -- which is supposed to have 5400 or something.
I'll be impressed when there's a 10.000-person LANparty. Not that I see the point of that many people, but anyway.
OK, so there will be some encryption incompatibility in future versions of whatever proprietary Zip-compression applications? Who cares I say.
It's time for Zip to die. tar+gzip compresses better, and tar+bzip2 still better. Guess the only reason it lives is because of the network effect -- because "everyone" has it, even project admins who realize Zip is crappy make zip packages alongside their tar.{gz,bz2} packages.
diediedie(COMPRESSION_ZIP) is all I say
Disclaimer: No, I didn't read the article, I'm just ranting.
I can't say I'm surprised such observations can be made. Nor am I upset about it. People will gain the skills they require, and if being able to write by hand legibly isn't a must we simply won't be very good at it. I expect that making words stick will be done by other methods than pencil and paper in the future, and the ability to write will be no more a requirement than it is for us to manouver a horse today.
Perhaps in a few decades writing by hand will be more of an art-form than something everyone needs to do.
I'm sorry, but I truly don't care. There are other uses for PNG than websites, and one can use PNG images without transparency too. An I'll admit that even if I did make a website with some transparent images, I'd use PNG anyway, because it's not important to me to please everyone -- especially not IE-users :)
Patented or not, GIF is an antiquated compression algorithm which performs quite poorly compared to PNG. There is descent browser support for PNG, and it can also do some nifty things which GIF cannot -- most importantly alpha transparency as opposed to binary transparency.
It seems most people just don't care enough to use PNG though, so I wouldn't expect it to take over the net very soon.
Wow, I wonder what sort of system this guy could be running. Crash more often -- am I the only one who expects my software to not crash, no matter what (although admittedly it has on two occasions the last year :P ) ?
Oh. Windows XP it says in the next paragraph...
Nice to hear someone with a clue speak about Free Software and the GNU project for a change. For reasons that aren't terribly easy to grok, RMS keeps telling people not to use the term intellectual property, so you might want to read that too :)
To the extent that I can see, that term isn't very good, because it accepts the premise that thoughts, ideas and concepts can be owned, which many believe shouldn't be possible, me included. There are other reasons to, so read the link.
No, actually that isn't true. From section 6 of the GPL:
... to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Hence you may not add requirements about what sort of notices are displayed, because that is in effect restricting the user to not modifying the program in a certain way. (On a side note, it's not allowed to remove copyright notices printed by an interactive program, but that's another issue). I guess maybe what you're thinking about is the invariant sections allowed by the GNU FDL (Free Documentaion License). These may not be changed, but must deal with things of personal or political nature which does not deal with the subject matter of the main part of the document (this has been misunderstood, hehe).
... If a corporation has code which they recieved under the GPL in a product of theirs which they distribute and someone found out, then they'd be in a bit of trouble. What would happen is that since the corporation is distributing under a non-GPL license, their rights to the GPLd code automatically becomes null and void, and they can chose, as you say to either comply completely with the GPL, or remove the code in question.
Recall however that the same code can be distributed under many different licenses if the copyright holders want to, so me licensing a few hundred lines of my (no one elses!) code to you under the GPL doesn't mean that I can't use that code in my proprietary software product. So if SCO's code has gotten into the kernel and they accidently redistribute it (which I understand isn't the case, but let's pretend) the only legal effect would be that that precise code is now under the GPL. But if someone has taken SCO's code unlicensed (don't say steal) and put it into the kernel, then that person is not the copyright holder of that code, and could not place it under the GPL in the first place. As a consequence, the GPL for that code is again null and void, and it would have to be removed from the kernel.
If software patents are involved... well I don't know. Just recall that the GPL requires any patents on code to be licensed to all third parties for any use at no royalty-fee, so if SCO has distributed GPLd code for which they hold patents and don't allow this, then once again the license becomes void, and removing the affected code should be the solution.
Don't trust my word for it though, I don't really know what sort of claims SCO are making (can't be bothered to read all these articles), so the situation may be somewhat different
I tried gentoo for a few days between Slackware and Debian, and found myself throwing it out, well, within a few days. It wasn't because it wasnt' nifty, not because it didn't work as expected.
The problem I found myself battling was how to not install non-free software. When I had most things installed, I thought it would be a good time to install MPlayer too. On Slackware I'd always avoided the win32-codecs, because I simply don't want to use non-free software (if the option is not watching the video and using non-free stuff, I chose not watching).
Anyway, when emerging MPlayer, the emerge system started downloading these wretched w32-codecs, and I thought WTF?! Asking about in #gentoo I found out I had to remove the win32-codecs from the emerge script. OK, so I did that. The next thing was OpenOffice, which suddenly wanted to install Blackdown Java, which also qualifies as non-free. It wouldn't have been much trouble fixing that either, but if I have to read all the emerge scripts to make sure nothing non-free is installed (and also figure out what actually is non-free), I'm not not going to have much fun with gentoo.
If someone wants to use non-free software on their computer, I'm not going to be a total bitch about it (although I'd reccomend against it), but for my computer, it should be my choise. I filed a bug-report, and found out that there was an environment var ACCEPT_LICENSES, but that there was no code behind it yet. Very well I thought, I'll just use a (the) distro that makes it easy for me to use only free software, and that is what I do today (debian)
I saw the anouncement that someone had begun implementing Theora playback in Xine a while ago. I've been playing with theora, encoding whatever I could find. I find that the quality of Theora is quite good, but it consumes a lot of CPU when decoding. Perhaps in Xine, playback is less CPU-demanding (I can't image example_player was optimized).
(On a side note: it was fun encoding First Contact as theora -- it required 90GB of temporary space, and I watched it only by changing the resolution close to the width of encoded video)
Now I can encode to Theora and compare in fullscreen! Yipee! I hope the beta isn't too far away, so more people will dare check it out, so it can eventually gain the same momentum that Vorbis has now.
Was this supposed to be a funny troll?
Granted, for a while MPlayer was better than Xine in terms of performance, support for different codecs etc. Performance is still better I should guess, but I haven't really tried. And yes, MPlayer can play that severely broken fsfawards2001.vob.
However, look inside of MPlayer and you'll see that everything isn't as perfect. Everything is joined as one package -- gui built together with the rest of the code. No possibility of turning deinterlacing on and off during playback, or even toggling it with a gui.
Enter Xine: libxine takes care of decoding buisness and talks to the output mechanisms (oss+xv in my case). It doesn't provide even a text-interface. All interface is done by xine-ui, gxine, kxine and some other alternatives. Take a pick.
You may say that how it works inside is irrelevant, but I (being half-and-half a programmer) sure don't agree. As things grow, having clearly definied roles for each component will help avoid the tangled up state MPlayer is in. This is why the original developer of MPlayer left the project a while back ago, and then a little later said he was going to start libmplayer, which doesn't provide any gui or anything. Sound familiar?
Oh, and in case it was a long time since you tried Xine, try again -- it's improved quite alot.
Here are a few examples:
I can't get my hands on a license without downloading the software
The same thing. They obviously don't want us to read it unecessarily
You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the Software, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the Software to a human-perceivable form. That's more clear cut, and straight out said than in most licenses
You may not modify the Software or create derivative works based upon the Software.
You may not export the Software into any country prohibited by the United States Export Administration Act and the regulations thereunder.
Which I guess means that Cubans, Lybians, Iranians, North Koreans, Syrians and some others can't use the software, but I may well be wrong as for which nationalities this is.
Except as specifically authorized in any Supplemental License Terms, you may not make copies of Software, other than a single copy of Software for archival purposes. Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software.
You may not modify the Java Platform Interface ("JPI", identified as classes contained within the "java" package or any subpackages of the "java" package), by creating additional classes within the JPI or otherwise causing the addition to or modification of the classes in the JPI.
You acknowledge that the Software may automatically download, install, and execute applets, applications, software extensions, and updated versions of the Software from Sun ("Software Updates")
Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code.
As you see, the licenses limit the terms of use , modification and redistribuation of the software in ways which are to me not acceptable.
The reason is quite simple. As a Free Software follower, I don't want to use any software which doesn't give the freedoms/rights I want for myself and everyone else.
In less abstract terms: I don't want to agree to Reals license agreements or use their software, because it doesn't allow to do the things I should be allowed to do: study how it works, make changes to it and distribute derivative works (I would need the source code, and permission to use it for this to be possible). If you hang on a while I'll post another reply with some extracts from some of the EULAs.
I frequently get bashed here at slashdot for saying such things, but if don't have any control over the software (i.e. it's proprietary and/or non-free), then I don't want to use it -- no matter how good it is. If you want to know some of the reasons why non-free software is bad then go read up on GNU's philosophy section. Even if you find you don't agree with the GNU philosophy, you should know about it, because any GNU/Linux system (including Libranet) is build on and with GNU tools (and a lot of other of course, GNU should'nt be getting all the credit).
Does anyone know if Libranet categorizes software into main, contrib and non-free so that one could easily avoid the non-free things the reviewer mentions:
* Opera 6.0
* RealPlayer
* Flash (could be a free version?)
* Java (perhaps not the non-free one either?)
* MS TrueType fonts
* NVidia 3d accelerated drivers for X
He says "Libranet is 100% compatible with Debian" so I guess one could remove the non-free sources from sources.list?
What I think you're failing to see is that there is a very good reason that you must assign copyright to the FSF when you contribute to some of the GNU projects. Should there ever be a legal situation where someone violates the GPL of say GCC by distributing a modified version under a non-free license, the FSF would probably want to take legal action. To do so, it's important that they have the copyright on it all, or all parties who have contributed would have to join in. From the GNU website (http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_5.html):
In other words, it isn't so much an ego-thing for the FSF/GNU, as a practical consideration. Note that there have been historically situations where a contribution made by an entity without assigning copyright has lead to the end of a project. I believe this happened to the original Emacs implementation, and caused RMS to start over implementing it in C. I think this may be one of the reasons he devised the GPL too. Admittedly, it wasn't really an identical situation (different license all together), but it gives you some idea why it might be good idea to control your work.
As for all your conspiracy theories, I _would_ trust the FSF with my code -- there's no guarantee that the FSF won't become a distributor of non-free software, but I think everyone agrees that's _highly_ unlikely, no?