I've been fairly impressed with Firebird and hope the move to 1.5 will start the integration of Firebird concerns, bugs, and issues to the main trunk to be hashed out.
I think the Mozilla developers have been doing an excellent job lately, especially with respect to choreographing releases with future development needs. --- the switch-over to Firebird could have been disasterous or annoying, but it's been smooth.
What distributions want are non-trivial solutions. Frankly, "bc" and "dc" are both better command-line calculators that are known and distributed as standard already.
If you can improve on one or both of these, then your name can be in bright lights. It's doubtful you can complete with them in the niche where they've been specialising in for decades using a few lines of perl.
(No offense to perl coders -- I'm doing a great deal of that myself these days.)
Sun probably already knew this LGPL catch-22 already. Consider this: they made Java with as an intent-towards-community. Their essential difference from Free software is that "the" community is under their control and aegis.
Why am I treating this difference like crime scene evidence? Because it justifies all the software decisions they've been making since Day One. Including SCO, Microsoft expansionism, _and_ the LGPL.
I just looked over the links in earlier replies (PGXML and HTML-Writers) and was surprised: HTML-Writers hasn't touched only converted 20-odd etexts from Jan to Feb 2000; and PGXML hasn't even the ability to do valid HTML curled quotes.
Both look like amateur do-gooders, and we need more of those; but these efforts should be folded back into the organisation of PG, where they may find a permanent home. The alternative is to go adrift, due to too few people being involved (only _two_ people do PGXML) to round out the abilities (and future efforts of) XML uber-format-goodness.
One major reason why I'd be interested in a longer toolchain, from scans into TXT, and TXT into XML, is to make translation easier. All the older Gutenberg etexts are in different, revised formats. Try making a parser than automagically transforms the dozen or so revisions of the one true "TXT" into XML to see what I mean. (I have; there will always be some books that break important Gutenbrth formatting placeholders).
It's kind of strange that she didn't try to refute any claim from the Stallman article. In point of fact, between the obvious character assassination, she was interested only in one statement: that she's not asking for software-based patents.
But when she argues later in her article, it's not clear at all that she has any sophisticated definition of how software patents are different from what she's arguing. (RMS's article was clearer on that, and it was a chief criticism of the legislation.) In summary, she didn't refute or define anything.
There's been plenty of case studies where, according to the results, flicker is perceivable for some groups of people, but not others. Something tells me that the framerate that a videocam would pick up need not be technologically dissimilar than what is needed for a viewer of the same category to see this flicker in the theatre. It's bad enough we all have monitors without exacerbating the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the Mozilla developers have been doing an excellent job lately, especially with respect to choreographing releases with future development needs. --- the switch-over to Firebird could have been disasterous or annoying, but it's been smooth.
If you can improve on one or both of these, then your name can be in bright lights. It's doubtful you can complete with them in the niche where they've been specialising in for decades using a few lines of perl.
(No offense to perl coders -- I'm doing a great deal of that myself these days.)
Why am I treating this difference like crime scene evidence? Because it justifies all the software decisions they've been making since Day One. Including SCO, Microsoft expansionism, _and_ the LGPL.
Both look like amateur do-gooders, and we need more of those; but these efforts should be folded back into the organisation of PG, where they may find a permanent home. The alternative is to go adrift, due to too few people being involved (only _two_ people do PGXML) to round out the abilities (and future efforts of) XML uber-format-goodness.
One major reason why I'd be interested in a longer toolchain, from scans into TXT, and TXT into XML, is to make translation easier. All the older Gutenberg etexts are in different, revised formats. Try making a parser than automagically transforms the dozen or so revisions of the one true "TXT" into XML to see what I mean. (I have; there will always be some books that break important Gutenbrth formatting placeholders).
Seems like they have faster updates down in New Zealand -- my copy of Screem is sooo old it only updates web sites!
But when she argues later in her article, it's not clear at all that she has any sophisticated definition of how software patents are different from what she's arguing. (RMS's article was clearer on that, and it was a chief criticism of the legislation.) In summary, she didn't refute or define anything.
There's been plenty of case studies where, according to the results, flicker is perceivable for some groups of people, but not others. Something tells me that the framerate that a videocam would pick up need not be technologically dissimilar than what is needed for a viewer of the same category to see this flicker in the theatre. It's bad enough we all have monitors without exacerbating the problem.
And distributed in a .tar.gz format too.
/that/ will stay up before
Hmmm, wonder how long
the Microsoft EULA lawyers have their say.