I think the point is that because the meaning is not clear (at least, it might not be clear to a court), you can't use Artistic licensed software without running the risk of lawsuits and other nastiness.
You may think the FSF are being overly cautious here, but you should never underestimate the stupidity of the legal system.
Maybe if this is successful, big software-using companies might start lobbying against software patents too?
After all, for every large software publisher like Microsoft or Lucent who benefit from software patents, there are a dozen equally large software users who lose out from the market distortion and lack of competition that software patents cause.
Yes, the Artistic License by itself is probably not a good idea. The GNU people don't reckon it counts as a free software licence:
We cannot say that this is a free software license because it is too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear. We urge you to avoid using it, except as part of the disjunctive license of Perl.
To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?
Yeah, it's bad to put up people's taxes to pay for research, but it could be even worse to patent the research and make people pay exorbitant licensing fees. At least if the research is funded by taxation, everybody has equal access to it and there can be competition in implementing it, giving lower prices.
Paying an extra $10 in tax to save $100 on your electricity bill isn't such a bad deal. Of course, this technology may not be like that.
Doesn't work as you might expect. You have to dereference things manually. You get used to it after a while, but it still grates a little, especially after seeing how easy it is in other languages. (Easy things should be easy!)
You will end up with a single flat array. Instead you have to take a reference to the arrays you want to nest. For this reason, mapping Python to Perl would be easiest if you map Python lists to Perl list references.
I use Perl a lot; while I've read the book Learning Python, I haven't really used the language, so please correct me if I'm wrong:
It seems that the essential structure of Perl and Python is pretty similar most of the time. Okay, Python doesn't have function closures and other funky features, but most programs and libraries don't use them. Similarly, the two OO paradigms are a little different, but the basics - creating an object, simple inheritance - are the same, and this is often all you use anyway. Applying the 80/20 rule, you could say that they are pretty similar.
What would be cool is a way to call Perl libraries from Python, and vice versa. For example, Perl's DBI is said to be better than Python's database drivers (which tend to be specific to a particular DBMS). Since most DBI methods are just creating an object, performing an action, or returning a list as a result, it would be easy to write Python wrappers for them. Similarly, some cool things like wxWindows have Python bindings and no Perl bindings, but the features they use aren't particularly Python-specific. (wxWindows is written in C++.)
So how about a general interface for Python that wraps any Perl module? Then Python programmers could take advantage of the world's largest archive of reusable software, CPAN. It would be a fairly simple matter (I suppose) to load in libperl.so, tell it to load the Perl module, and then whenever a call is made to the module, marshal the arguments from Python dictionaries to Perl hashes, Python strings to Perl strings and so on. Of course many modules which depend on Perl intricacies wouldn't work here, but most modules would.
The opposite interface would be fairly similar. Since Perl's lists and hashes do not nest, you'd need to convert a Python function or method returning a list to a Perl one returning a list reference. But apart from that things should be just the same.
I'm a keen Perl programmer, and the one thing that's stopping me from trying Python out for real work is that I'd have to wave goodbye to all those lovely CPAN libraries. So could someone with more knowledge say whether a scheme like the above is possible?
Rob, please tell the slashdot authors to stop interjecting their personal beliefs / commentary into the news posts. I've been watching this for some time and it's really starting to grate. Let ME be the judge of whether it's new and insightful (or inciteful) or not.
The whole point is that the Slashdot authors decide what is interesting and new. They sift through hundreds of submitted stories to find a dozen that are worth putting on Slashdot. If you want to be the judge of what's interesting, you'll have to go out looking for stories yourself.
A brief explanation of why the story was picked - 'not new but interesting', 'funny', and so on - helps the reader to decide whether to read the rest of the article and the comments. Not everyone wants to read through every single story on Slashdot; I'm glad of a few hints from the editors as to what's worth my time.
RSA's patent was probably 'legitimate' as it was a patent on real, new research. (Britain's GCHQ say that they invented public-key crypto some years previously, but it wasn't published.)
The question is, is it worthwhile granting software patents even for things like this? We have to ask whether the invention would have been made anyway, without the promise of a patent monopoly.
The purpose of the patent system is not to grant special favours to inventors. It is to increase the stock of inventions available to the public, by granting a temporary monopoly in exchange for publishing an idea; this is preferable to inventions being kept secret. Latterly, the possibility of getting a patent has encouraged the development of new inventions in the first place.
So is it worthwhile granting a patent on encryption algorithms to help disclosure? Not really, you have to disclose an encryption system anyway if people are to trust it. What about to provide an incentive for it to be discovered in the first place? I think it unlikely that Rivest Shamir and Adleman were motivated by the thought of getting a patent. So in this case the public has lost out, granting a 20-year monopoly in exchange for something they would have gotten anyway. That's a bad deal.
There may be some software techniques that genuinely do need patent protection to provide an incentive for them to be developed. But personally, I doubt it; the industry has done well enough over the past 50 years without patents. And this small number is more than outweighed by the huge damage that software patents cause.
As for providing a special kind of time-limited patent for software, the GATT treaty requires patents to last 20 years. So the choice is between 20-year software patents and no software patents. I believe that the latter is preferable, especially since we already have copyright for software.
You can check out a letter I wrote to the UK Patent Office if you'd like more explanation of this. I might as well put in a link:-)
two tabs are better than no tabs and perhaps four tabs are even better than two
A tab on Unix is eight characters. So four tabs is overdoing it a little. (I use eight-character indents for C, four characters for Perl, following the example of the languages' creators.)
Elite ran in 32Kbyte of RAM. The disk version used overlays so that it could have more different ship types.
Have you played the Archimedes version of Elite (ArcElite)? It's considered by many to be better than the BBC version. I would agree that the Amiga version and the two DOS versions never quite equalled the original Elite.
But the ChangeLog isn't ordered according to versions, it's all jumbled together. You could write a Perl script to parse it and extract the newer entries if you wanted though.
Somebody should point out to the legislators that there are many more businesses that use software, and would be harmed by this legislation, than the small number of software companies that would benefit. So if they want to attract business to their state, they should not pass UCITA.
Don't use your e-mail address for your anonymous FTP password.
Isn't that rather inconsiderate towards the person running the FTP server? They would like to know your address so that they can contact you if you're hogging bandwidth or otherwise messing up the server for other users. You could create a new address just for this purpose, of course. But realistically, how many FTP sites are collecting addresses for spam or marketing anyway?
Eeek! But I forgot about Slashdot's HTML 'translation'. So the spaceship operator didn't appear. Maybe one day Rob will fix the text box to handle these characters properly. Or I could use Tom's posting script.
How come laptops don't have trackerballs any more? IMHO the scratch-pad is pretty much the worst pointing device you could devise. I heard that trackerballs were too expensive, but that can't be a reason on a 3.5k pound machine like this.
I believe such a system has been tried before, marketed on the grounds of less wear and tear as well as sound quality. IIRC the problem is that without a needle making physical contact, there is no way to get dirt out of the grooves of your record.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that because the meaning is not clear (at least, it might not be clear to a court), you can't use Artistic licensed software without running the risk of lawsuits and other nastiness.
You may think the FSF are being overly cautious here, but you should never underestimate the stupidity of the legal system.
Maybe if this is successful, big software-using companies might start lobbying against software patents too?
After all, for every large software publisher like Microsoft or Lucent who benefit from software patents, there are a dozen equally large software users who lose out from the market distortion and lack of competition that software patents cause.
GTK and the GIMP were ported to Windows using MSVC++ and later gcc: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/.
Yes, the Artistic License by itself is probably not a good idea. The GNU people don't reckon it counts as a free software licence:
Couldn't you just use a small bit of JavaScript to pull the whole page from somewhere else?
Alternatively, you could use PerlScript and write the whole page in obfuscated Perl.
Now all we need is a web browser in under 5Kbyte.
I'm sure I heard that Microsoft Proxy Server, along with other proprietary web-cache software, is based on Squid. Is this true?
Yes, or you can use the software ARMulator written by ARM Ltd, a version of which is GPLed. It might be a bit slower though :-)
To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?
An, er, interesting solution is Calmira. It's a Win95 lookalike shell for Windows 3.1x. And it runs under Wine.
So you can use it for the Explorer-a-like file manager, under Linux. Twisted, but it did work last time I tried.
Yeah, it's bad to put up people's taxes to pay for research, but it could be even worse to patent the research and make people pay exorbitant licensing fees. At least if the research is funded by taxation, everybody has equal access to it and there can be competition in implementing it, giving lower prices.
Paying an extra $10 in tax to save $100 on your electricity bill isn't such a bad deal. Of course, this technology may not be like that.
Yes, it works how _I'd_ expect too, but that's because I'm used to Perl's wierdnesses. It's still ultra-bizarre compared to:
a = [1, 2, [3, 4, 5]];
b = a[2];
in some language that doesn't have Perl's legacy of always flattening lists (which seems to be a leftover from before perl5).
No, it doesn't come to the same thing. Witness:
@a = ([1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]);
@b = $a[1];
Doesn't work as you might expect. You have to dereference things manually. You get used to it after a while, but it still grates a little, especially after seeing how easy it is in other languages. (Easy things should be easy!)
But you can't just do
@a = ((1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6));
You will end up with a single flat array. Instead you have to take a reference to the arrays you want to nest. For this reason, mapping Python to Perl would be easiest if you map Python lists to Perl list references.
I use Perl a lot; while I've read the book Learning Python, I haven't really used the language, so please correct me if I'm wrong:
It seems that the essential structure of Perl and Python is pretty similar most of the time. Okay, Python doesn't have function closures and other funky features, but most programs and libraries don't use them. Similarly, the two OO paradigms are a little different, but the basics - creating an object, simple inheritance - are the same, and this is often all you use anyway. Applying the 80/20 rule, you could say that they are pretty similar.
What would be cool is a way to call Perl libraries from Python, and vice versa. For example, Perl's DBI is said to be better than Python's database drivers (which tend to be specific to a particular DBMS). Since most DBI methods are just creating an object, performing an action, or returning a list as a result, it would be easy to write Python wrappers for them. Similarly, some cool things like wxWindows have Python bindings and no Perl bindings, but the features they use aren't particularly Python-specific. (wxWindows is written in C++.)
So how about a general interface for Python that wraps any Perl module? Then Python programmers could take advantage of the world's largest archive of reusable software, CPAN. It would be a fairly simple matter (I suppose) to load in libperl.so, tell it to load the Perl module, and then whenever a call is made to the module, marshal the arguments from Python dictionaries to Perl hashes, Python strings to Perl strings and so on. Of course many modules which depend on Perl intricacies wouldn't work here, but most modules would.
The opposite interface would be fairly similar. Since Perl's lists and hashes do not nest, you'd need to convert a Python function or method returning a list to a Perl one returning a list reference. But apart from that things should be just the same.
I'm a keen Perl programmer, and the one thing that's stopping me from trying Python out for real work is that I'd have to wave goodbye to all those lovely CPAN libraries. So could someone with more knowledge say whether a scheme like the above is possible?
The whole point is that the Slashdot authors decide what is interesting and new. They sift through hundreds of submitted stories to find a dozen that are worth putting on Slashdot. If you want to be the judge of what's interesting, you'll have to go out looking for stories yourself.
A brief explanation of why the story was picked - 'not new but interesting', 'funny', and so on - helps the reader to decide whether to read the rest of the article and the comments. Not everyone wants to read through every single story on Slashdot; I'm glad of a few hints from the editors as to what's worth my time.
RSA's patent was probably 'legitimate' as it was a patent on real, new research. (Britain's GCHQ say that they invented public-key crypto some years previously, but it wasn't published.)
The question is, is it worthwhile granting software patents even for things like this? We have to ask whether the invention would have been made anyway, without the promise of a patent monopoly.
The purpose of the patent system is not to grant special favours to inventors. It is to increase the stock of inventions available to the public, by granting a temporary monopoly in exchange for publishing an idea; this is preferable to inventions being kept secret. Latterly, the possibility of getting a patent has encouraged the development of new inventions in the first place.
So is it worthwhile granting a patent on encryption algorithms to help disclosure? Not really, you have to disclose an encryption system anyway if people are to trust it. What about to provide an incentive for it to be discovered in the first place? I think it unlikely that Rivest Shamir and Adleman were motivated by the thought of getting a patent. So in this case the public has lost out, granting a 20-year monopoly in exchange for something they would have gotten anyway. That's a bad deal.
There may be some software techniques that genuinely do need patent protection to provide an incentive for them to be developed. But personally, I doubt it; the industry has done well enough over the past 50 years without patents. And this small number is more than outweighed by the huge damage that software patents cause.
As for providing a special kind of time-limited patent for software, the GATT treaty requires patents to last 20 years. So the choice is between 20-year software patents and no software patents. I believe that the latter is preferable, especially since we already have copyright for software.
You can check out a letter I wrote to the UK Patent Office if you'd like more explanation of this. I might as well put in a linkA tab on Unix is eight characters. So four tabs is overdoing it a little. (I use eight-character indents for C, four characters for Perl, following the example of the languages' creators.)
Elite ran in 32Kbyte of RAM. The disk version used overlays so that it could have more different ship types.
Have you played the Archimedes version of Elite (ArcElite)? It's considered by many to be better than the BBC version. I would agree that the Amiga version and the two DOS versions never quite equalled the original Elite.
But the ChangeLog isn't ordered according to versions, it's all jumbled together. You could write a Perl script to parse it and extract the newer entries if you wanted though.
Somebody should point out to the legislators that there are many more businesses that use software, and would be harmed by this legislation, than the small number of software companies that would benefit. So if they want to attract business to their state, they should not pass UCITA.
Isn't that rather inconsiderate towards the person running the FTP server? They would like to know your address so that they can contact you if you're hogging bandwidth or otherwise messing up the server for other users. You could create a new address just for this purpose, of course. But realistically, how many FTP sites are collecting addresses for spam or marketing anyway?
Eeek! But I forgot about Slashdot's HTML 'translation'. So the spaceship operator didn't appear. Maybe one day Rob will fix the text box to handle these characters properly. Or I could use Tom's posting script.
I think that should be $a->[0] $b->[0].
How come laptops don't have trackerballs any more? IMHO the scratch-pad is pretty much the worst pointing device you could devise. I heard that trackerballs were too expensive, but that can't be a reason on a 3.5k pound machine like this.
I believe such a system has been tried before, marketed on the grounds of less wear and tear as well as sound quality. IIRC the problem is that without a needle making physical contact, there is no way to get dirt out of the grooves of your record.