The main point of the GPL is that you can use existing building blocks, solve your own problems with them, and then share your solution with others. Sometimes, the GPL is also used for scientific and academic reasons (reproducibility).
I think people should be suspicious of anybody who writes GPL'ed code to become famous or improve their skills (hello, Gnome and KDE). And anybody who tries to write GPL'ed code for that purpose has no right to complain when other take their code (under the GPL) and actually modify and use it so that it fits their own needs.
Open source and the GPL are not here to make you famous, they are here to help you solve your problems.
Remember, the Incas were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively.
And our epiatph will be: "The Americans were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the internal combustion engine, petrochemical industries, plastics, and nuclear power, they actually used them for widespread mass transportation and production of goods, thus sealing their own doom and endangering the health of the whole planet."
Whether our civilization will last even as long as that of the Incas, let alone some of the long-lived historical civilizations is still a completely open book. But restraint in which technologies we actually use in practice may well be necessary if we don't want to go extinct really soon.
Well, that's all nice and good, but the one and true binary calendar, the UNIX calendar, ends on Jan 19, 2038. So, that is really the end of all time and the beginning of a new cycle.
It's a lesson in economics, explains Mercer Island's state Rep. Fred Jarrett, No. 2 Republican on the House transportation committee.
Auctioning off a small number of stickers on eBay will tell them nothing about what most people are willing to pay for these kinds of stickers. He can look up in the literature why. Jarrett should have received his economics education in college, not "on the job", playing around with billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Without a plan for new transportation funding, the default is ``apocalypse,'' Jarrett said. ``The system collapses and we have to rebuild it from scratch.''
That's exactly what they should do: housing density in Seattle and surroundings is high enough that it needs a dense system of public transportation. If they want to lead the nation in new ideas, personal rapid transit deployed along existing highways would combine the convenience of the automobile with the speed of unobstructed highways and it would not require any new land.
Building more highways just won't work, and letting people buy preferential access to existing highways does absolutely nothing to improve transportation.
But the only solution to this would be to make it take longer for everyone, regardless of whether or not they had their identity stolen!
Sounds good to me. Let's make good authentication for financial transactions mandatory for everybody. If everybody needs to do it, companies will figure out how to make it simple.
No, you are the one who is incorrect. Any charges which are made to my credit card without my permission are not my responsibility, so long as I myself did not negligently provide anyone else with access to my account.
Yes, and after a few months and hours and hours on the phone, you may be able to get your money back. But if the bank refuses, your only choice is to sue, which will probably cost you more than your credit limit, provided that you can find a lawyer who takes such cases at all.
I've had this happen to me. If someone makes unauthorized charges to your credit card, practically, it ends up being your own problem, no matter what the legal situation may be.
I can't remember the last time I went to a music store. But I don't pirate music either. Instead, I order all music CDs on-line and have them shipped to me--much bigger selection, less hassle. I suspect that's the problem the brick-and-mortar music stores are suffering from.
No. Offering a cost-free binary-only version would have been strategic. Open sourcing SO is an additional step that is purely benevolent. Sun contributes the most in terms of developer time to SO and could have kept it closed.
I disagree. A closed-source StarOffice would have had no chance in the market and its development would have stalled. Furthermore, Sun wouldn't have benefitted from keeping StarOffice proprietary and closed source.
If you did that to a person, instead of a company, you'd hopefully be ashamed of yourself.
If a person gave me a gift valued at several million dollars, I wouldn't be grateful either, I would turn it down; it would mean either that the giver has some ulterior motive that I don't know about, or the giver is out of his mind. Whichever is the case, it would be improper to accept it, so the question of "gratitude" doesn't even come up.
And, in fact, the same applies to open source. Companies should contribute to open source projects if and only if they benefit from them. If Sun open sourced Staroffice out of "benevolence", then we shouldn't be grateful for it, we should just assume that Sun is crazy and trust them even less.
So has IBM. No company is angelic in this business.
Oh, care to give examples? I think IBM has been very well-behaved relative to open source since they adopted Linux as a major part of their strategy.
In any case, at issue isn't Sun's action in some cases, at issue is whether we can trust Sun in all cases to do the right thing vis-a-vis open source. I think they have proven that they can't always be trusted, and that means that we need to be extra careful with systems like Java. Unlike OpenOffice, which is an end-user application, bad faith by Sun over Java could prove a very serious problem to the open source community because a lot of packages would be affected by it.
Open sourcing StarOffice was a strategic decision by Sun. Yes, it benefitted open source, but it also was essential for Sun.
Do you think Munich would be considering 14000 Linux desktops with KWord or Abiword? Think again. It's all about OpenOffice.
Well, with 14000 Linux desktops, there is a good chance that Munich will also be using Sun servers for some of their server functions, which is the kind of thing Sun wanted to accomplish with OpenOffice.
I think if OpenOffice hadn't happened, AbiWord would probably be a bit better now as there would have been more resources devoted to improving it.
Sometimes they are benevolent to free software
Sometimes what they are doing is beneficial for free software, but I wouldn't call doing something that is largely motivated by self-interest "benevolent".
and sometimes (like now with the "ditch AIX and use Solaris" campaign) they are just pricks
My point is that Sun has demonstrated both the ability and willingness to be "pricks". Therefore, we need to be particularly careful when we deal with their software. Whether Sun has been "benevolent" with the release OpenOffice matters little if they managed to create a situation where they could (say) destroy the Linux application server market by some legal means (c.f. the JBoss controversy).
Much of why Sun is being "pricks" some of the time is explained by Sun's business model: they make their money shipping UNIX machines, and Linux interferes with that. Contrast that with IBM, for whom (these days) consulting is a much bigger chunk, so IBM really has little motivation to hurt open source.
Still, ultimately, we should to demand sound open source license from any company that claims to be playing in the open source space. I don't consider Sun's JCP and community licenses sound from an open source point of view, and hence I am saying "beware of Sun".
Every anti-spam measure will lead to increased spam traffic, and the spam traffic has increased.
But this measure will lead to increased non-spam traffic, as legitimate mailers have to queue legitimate messages and resend them.
And it's ineffective because there is no reason why spammers wouldn't just re-send the same message; this method increases the cost for spam and non-spam messages equally.
If there's a claim that spam will be stopped without effort or cost that seems to say everyone can just stop all efforts and spam will disappear.
Nonsense. There are good spam defeating methods, and there are bad ones. This is a bad one.
What's a better one than this? The SMTP server classifies incoming messages into spam and non-spam. If it's spam, it deletes it. If you are into blacklisting hosts, you can refuse connections from servers that frequently send you spam.
I think Sun is trying to be the new Microsoft/SCO, they are only not quite as good at it:
Like Microsoft, Sun is trying to create a proprietary platform and standard, something they ultimately have control over. Of course, like Microsoft, they like it when users make suggestions and do their work for them (JCP), and like Microsoft, they make available lots of source to their users.
Like SCO, Sun has made claims in the past that if you as much as look at their source code for a particular product, if you later go on to develop your own version, it's a "derivative work". And now, they are spreading FUD about competitors, just like SCO.
While Microsoft followed through on their promise to create an ECMA C# standard, Sun pulled out of standardization bodies twice; that matters because many companies pushed for Java initially assuming that Sun would stick to their promises.
Sun also has been quietly taking out patents on aspects of Java that would make a compliant third party implementation hard.
Altogether, I'm not surprised at this action by Sun. What continually surprises me is that people view Sun as some kind of friend to open source software. The company is built on making open source software (Berkeley UNIX) proprietary, influential Sun employees like Gosling have a bad history with the open source movement, and Sun would like nothing more than to see Linux go away. One's enemy's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.
If the open source community isn't careful, what is happening with SCO and Linux now will happen with Sun and open source Java efforts in a few years. Sun will go down the drain, like SCO, they will get desparate, and they will almost certainly not disappear without lawsuits.
During the initial testing of Greylisting, it was observed that the vast majority of spam appears to be sent from applications designed specifically for spamming. These applications appear to adopt the "fire-and-forget" methodology.
Spam guards and spam co-evolve. Since greylisting is easy to get around by spammers, if it becomes widespread, spammers will take measures to avoid it, and the net result will be a lot of extra traffic.
In fact, the impact of this kind of system on mail could be pretty bad if widely adopted: large amounts of mail may end up being held up in delivering servers, and "informative" messages sent by helpful mail systems (about "temporary failures") may end up creating more junk mail than they avoid.
Aqua is just a bit bloated, sure, but with Quartz Extreme and a decent gfx card (9000 Pro in my case), it's rock-solid (not crashed once in 9 months, running 30-45 days uptime)
Both XFree86 and Aqua are quite usable in terms of reliability. But I own several Macs (iMac, PowerBook) running up-to-date OS X installations, and compared to a stable release of XFree86 with supported hardware, they crash more frequently and have more bugs.
and rather smooth and fast.
Aqua and Quartz are smooth and they do a few specific operations fast; that gives a pleasant user experience. But if you look at actual graphics speed, they are quite slow.
Just accept that he likes his Mac instead of accusing him of making stuff up.
I have no problem with him "liking" his Mac. I object to his claims that Macs in general are more reliable than Linux+XFree86. That's just wrong.
And whether the guy get this because of hardware issues or bad drivers doesn't matter.
It matters a great deal: if it is a hardware or driver problem, it's not a problem with the X server as he suggested. He controls what hardware he buys, and the best-engineered software can't help him if he tries to use bad hardware.
The Measurand itself looks useful for its intended purposes. But a lot of the "research" in HCI reminds me of the old tune...
You can pull all the stops out, till they call the cops out Grind your behind till you're banned But you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get a hand. You can sacrifice your sacro, workin' in the backrow Bump in a dump till you're dead Kid you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get ahead.
If the software is released under the BSD license it is available to a much broader population (the BSD license has far fewer restrictions on use).
Yes, indeed it does. Where you go wrong is in the assumption that governments have some obligation to make tax-payer funded software usable by as many people as possible. There is no such obligation, neither legally nor ethically.
The question of whether software should be distributed under a BSD or a GPL license is purely a question of policy and goals. And there are many good arguments that can be made for either license on a case-by-case basis.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Using Jot (or other character-at-a-time input methos), you can write on something as small as a watch face.
And with a BSD license, the publicly funded code is still freely available for anyone to use. Do you think it disappears off the face of the earth once someone incorporates it into proprietary software?
No, I don't think that. But nevertheless, there are differences in how GPL'ed and BSD'ed software can and cannot be used, and that means that they accomplish different goals. Which license to pick for government funded projects should depend on considerations of what the government wants to accomplish with that funding.
So, my point is simply that there is no intrinsic reason to prefer BSD over GPL for publicly funded software development: imposing the kinds of restrictions that the GPL imposes on software is a perfectly legitimate thing to do for taxpayer-funded projects. Whether it is good public policy is a separate debate (I happen to think it is).
This is for discussions of software being *developed* with government dollars, not when bidding is going on to use existing software for a contract, which is a whole different issue. But when development is done with everyone's dollars, it should be open for use by all.
The GPL makes it open for use by all. And unlike other licenses, it ensures that the software will remain open for use by all.
Government contracts are paid for by tax dollars ultimately, and in the end a large percentage of that comes from business as well as from individuals.
So? Taxes don't necessarily pay for something specific. Furthermore, just because something got purchased with tax dollars doesn't mean you can do with it as you please.
The BSD license may make sense for publicly developed software, but so does the GPL license. Which is better depends on the project and is a matter of policy goals, not tax payers rights or principle.
Shouldn't they be spent on something where the user is completely free to modify - either licensed BSD, or public domain?
Why should they? Your tax payer dollars pay for your city park, yet you aren't free to set up a business in your city park; in fact, what you can do in your city park is quite restricted. And the purpose of those rules is so that everybody can enjoy the city park.
It's quite analogous with the GPL: tax payer dollars pay for the software, and the GPL ensures that the software remains there to be enjoyed by everybody.
Likewise, the fact that tax payer dollars pay for software development doesn't mean that anybody should be able to use that software for whatever they please.
Keep in mind that the same kind of people who make this argument against the GPL now had not trouble making the argument a few years ago that governments should pay for software development in the private sector and then leave ownership of that software with the companies that developed it.
You should improve your reading comprehension; there is no indication in this article that IBM endorses this action, or even knows about it. They just happen to be a member of the organization that does, one of over 1000 members.
Slashdot Mirror
The main point of the GPL is that you can use existing building blocks, solve your own problems with them, and then share your solution with others. Sometimes, the GPL is also used for scientific and academic reasons (reproducibility).
I think people should be suspicious of anybody who writes GPL'ed code to become famous or improve their skills (hello, Gnome and KDE). And anybody who tries to write GPL'ed code for that purpose has no right to complain when other take their code (under the GPL) and actually modify and use it so that it fits their own needs.
Open source and the GPL are not here to make you famous, they are here to help you solve your problems.
Remember, the Incas were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively.
And our epiatph will be: "The Americans were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the internal combustion engine, petrochemical industries, plastics, and nuclear power, they actually used them for widespread mass transportation and production of goods, thus sealing their own doom and endangering the health of the whole planet."
Whether our civilization will last even as long as that of the Incas, let alone some of the long-lived historical civilizations is still a completely open book. But restraint in which technologies we actually use in practice may well be necessary if we don't want to go extinct really soon.
Well, that's all nice and good, but the one and true binary calendar, the UNIX calendar, ends on Jan 19, 2038. So, that is really the end of all time and the beginning of a new cycle.
same as the original 7-bit ASCII was for the standard western alphabet
If you define American English as "the standard western alphabet". I think there are many westerners who would disagree...
It's a lesson in economics, explains Mercer Island's state Rep. Fred Jarrett, No. 2 Republican on the House transportation committee.
Auctioning off a small number of stickers on eBay will tell them nothing about what most people are willing to pay for these kinds of stickers. He can look up in the literature why. Jarrett should have received his economics education in college, not "on the job", playing around with billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Without a plan for new transportation funding, the default is ``apocalypse,'' Jarrett said. ``The system collapses and we have to rebuild it from scratch.''
That's exactly what they should do: housing density in Seattle and surroundings is high enough that it needs a dense system of public transportation. If they want to lead the nation in new ideas, personal rapid transit deployed along existing highways would combine the convenience of the automobile with the speed of unobstructed highways and it would not require any new land.
Building more highways just won't work, and letting people buy preferential access to existing highways does absolutely nothing to improve transportation.
But the only solution to this would be to make it take longer for everyone, regardless of whether or not they had their identity stolen!
Sounds good to me. Let's make good authentication for financial transactions mandatory for everybody. If everybody needs to do it, companies will figure out how to make it simple.
No, you are the one who is incorrect. Any charges which are made to my credit card without my permission are not my responsibility, so long as I myself did not negligently provide anyone else with access to my account.
Yes, and after a few months and hours and hours on the phone, you may be able to get your money back. But if the bank refuses, your only choice is to sue, which will probably cost you more than your credit limit, provided that you can find a lawyer who takes such cases at all.
I've had this happen to me. If someone makes unauthorized charges to your credit card, practically, it ends up being your own problem, no matter what the legal situation may be.
If you just want a small, light, portable PC, I think something like the Hush PC is a better choice.
If you want something smaller, you can get systems that fit into a drive bay here.
Then we are simply too different as people to communicate.
Yes, you are a jerk who quotes out of context. End of story. But, hey, you and Sun's PR department should get right along.
I can't remember the last time I went to a music store. But I don't pirate music either. Instead, I order all music CDs on-line and have them shipped to me--much bigger selection, less hassle. I suspect that's the problem the brick-and-mortar music stores are suffering from.
No. Offering a cost-free binary-only version would have been strategic. Open sourcing SO is an additional step that is purely benevolent. Sun contributes the most in terms of developer time to SO and could have kept it closed.
I disagree. A closed-source StarOffice would have had no chance in the market and its development would have stalled. Furthermore, Sun wouldn't have benefitted from keeping StarOffice proprietary and closed source.
If you did that to a person, instead of a company, you'd hopefully be ashamed of yourself.
If a person gave me a gift valued at several million dollars, I wouldn't be grateful either, I would turn it down; it would mean either that the giver has some ulterior motive that I don't know about, or the giver is out of his mind. Whichever is the case, it would be improper to accept it, so the question of "gratitude" doesn't even come up.
And, in fact, the same applies to open source. Companies should contribute to open source projects if and only if they benefit from them. If Sun open sourced Staroffice out of "benevolence", then we shouldn't be grateful for it, we should just assume that Sun is crazy and trust them even less.
So has IBM. No company is angelic in this business.
Oh, care to give examples? I think IBM has been very well-behaved relative to open source since they adopted Linux as a major part of their strategy.
In any case, at issue isn't Sun's action in some cases, at issue is whether we can trust Sun in all cases to do the right thing vis-a-vis open source. I think they have proven that they can't always be trusted, and that means that we need to be extra careful with systems like Java. Unlike OpenOffice, which is an end-user application, bad faith by Sun over Java could prove a very serious problem to the open source community because a lot of packages would be affected by it.
Uhh, OpenOffice?
Open sourcing StarOffice was a strategic decision by Sun. Yes, it benefitted open source, but it also was essential for Sun.
Do you think Munich would be considering 14000 Linux desktops with KWord or Abiword? Think again. It's all about OpenOffice.
Well, with 14000 Linux desktops, there is a good chance that Munich will also be using Sun servers for some of their server functions, which is the kind of thing Sun wanted to accomplish with OpenOffice.
I think if OpenOffice hadn't happened, AbiWord would probably be a bit better now as there would have been more resources devoted to improving it.
Sometimes they are benevolent to free software
Sometimes what they are doing is beneficial for free software, but I wouldn't call doing something that is largely motivated by self-interest "benevolent".
and sometimes (like now with the "ditch AIX and use Solaris" campaign) they are just pricks
My point is that Sun has demonstrated both the ability and willingness to be "pricks". Therefore, we need to be particularly careful when we deal with their software. Whether Sun has been "benevolent" with the release OpenOffice matters little if they managed to create a situation where they could (say) destroy the Linux application server market by some legal means (c.f. the JBoss controversy).
Much of why Sun is being "pricks" some of the time is explained by Sun's business model: they make their money shipping UNIX machines, and Linux interferes with that. Contrast that with IBM, for whom (these days) consulting is a much bigger chunk, so IBM really has little motivation to hurt open source.
Still, ultimately, we should to demand sound open source license from any company that claims to be playing in the open source space. I don't consider Sun's JCP and community licenses sound from an open source point of view, and hence I am saying "beware of Sun".
Every anti-spam measure will lead to increased spam traffic, and the spam traffic has increased.
But this measure will lead to increased non-spam traffic, as legitimate mailers have to queue legitimate messages and resend them.
And it's ineffective because there is no reason why spammers wouldn't just re-send the same message; this method increases the cost for spam and non-spam messages equally.
If there's a claim that spam will be stopped without effort or cost that seems to say everyone can just stop all efforts and spam will disappear.
Nonsense. There are good spam defeating methods, and there are bad ones. This is a bad one.
What's a better one than this? The SMTP server classifies incoming messages into spam and non-spam. If it's spam, it deletes it. If you are into blacklisting hosts, you can refuse connections from servers that frequently send you spam.
Altogether, I'm not surprised at this action by Sun. What continually surprises me is that people view Sun as some kind of friend to open source software. The company is built on making open source software (Berkeley UNIX) proprietary, influential Sun employees like Gosling have a bad history with the open source movement, and Sun would like nothing more than to see Linux go away. One's enemy's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.
If the open source community isn't careful, what is happening with SCO and Linux now will happen with Sun and open source Java efforts in a few years. Sun will go down the drain, like SCO, they will get desparate, and they will almost certainly not disappear without lawsuits.
During the initial testing of Greylisting, it was observed that the vast majority of spam appears to be sent from applications designed specifically for spamming. These applications appear to adopt the "fire-and-forget" methodology.
Spam guards and spam co-evolve. Since greylisting is easy to get around by spammers, if it becomes widespread, spammers will take measures to avoid it, and the net result will be a lot of extra traffic.
In fact, the impact of this kind of system on mail could be pretty bad if widely adopted: large amounts of mail may end up being held up in delivering servers, and "informative" messages sent by helpful mail systems (about "temporary failures") may end up creating more junk mail than they avoid.
Aqua is just a bit bloated, sure, but with Quartz Extreme and a decent gfx card (9000 Pro in my case), it's rock-solid (not crashed once in 9 months, running 30-45 days uptime)
Both XFree86 and Aqua are quite usable in terms of reliability. But I own several Macs (iMac, PowerBook) running up-to-date OS X installations, and compared to a stable release of XFree86 with supported hardware, they crash more frequently and have more bugs.
and rather smooth and fast.
Aqua and Quartz are smooth and they do a few specific operations fast; that gives a pleasant user experience. But if you look at actual graphics speed, they are quite slow.
Just accept that he likes his Mac instead of accusing him of making stuff up.
I have no problem with him "liking" his Mac. I object to his claims that Macs in general are more reliable than Linux+XFree86. That's just wrong.
And whether the guy get this because of hardware issues or bad drivers doesn't matter.
It matters a great deal: if it is a hardware or driver problem, it's not a problem with the X server as he suggested. He controls what hardware he buys, and the best-engineered software can't help him if he tries to use bad hardware.
and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well [...] and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly.
XFree86 is reliable and efficient, in particular compared to the Mac OS window system.
If your XFree86 server "locks [up] randomly", you probably have bad hardware, unsupported hardware, or perhaps you are just making it up.
If the software is released under the BSD license it is available to a much broader population (the BSD license has far fewer restrictions on use).
Yes, indeed it does. Where you go wrong is in the assumption that governments have some obligation to make tax-payer funded software usable by as many people as possible. There is no such obligation, neither legally nor ethically.
The question of whether software should be distributed under a BSD or a GPL license is purely a question of policy and goals. And there are many good arguments that can be made for either license on a case-by-case basis.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Using Jot (or other character-at-a-time input methos), you can write on something as small as a watch face.
And with a BSD license, the publicly funded code is still freely available for anyone to use. Do you think it disappears off the face of the earth once someone incorporates it into proprietary software?
No, I don't think that. But nevertheless, there are differences in how GPL'ed and BSD'ed software can and cannot be used, and that means that they accomplish different goals. Which license to pick for government funded projects should depend on considerations of what the government wants to accomplish with that funding.
So, my point is simply that there is no intrinsic reason to prefer BSD over GPL for publicly funded software development: imposing the kinds of restrictions that the GPL imposes on software is a perfectly legitimate thing to do for taxpayer-funded projects. Whether it is good public policy is a separate debate (I happen to think it is).
This is for discussions of software being *developed* with government dollars, not when bidding is going on to use existing software for a contract, which is a whole different issue. But when development is done with everyone's dollars, it should be open for use by all.
The GPL makes it open for use by all. And unlike other licenses, it ensures that the software will remain open for use by all.
Government contracts are paid for by tax dollars ultimately, and in the end a large percentage of that comes from business as well as from individuals.
So? Taxes don't necessarily pay for something specific. Furthermore, just because something got purchased with tax dollars doesn't mean you can do with it as you please.
The BSD license may make sense for publicly developed software, but so does the GPL license. Which is better depends on the project and is a matter of policy goals, not tax payers rights or principle.
Shouldn't they be spent on something where the user is completely free to modify - either licensed BSD, or public domain?
Why should they? Your tax payer dollars pay for your city park, yet you aren't free to set up a business in your city park; in fact, what you can do in your city park is quite restricted. And the purpose of those rules is so that everybody can enjoy the city park.
It's quite analogous with the GPL: tax payer dollars pay for the software, and the GPL ensures that the software remains there to be enjoyed by everybody.
Likewise, the fact that tax payer dollars pay for software development doesn't mean that anybody should be able to use that software for whatever they please.
Keep in mind that the same kind of people who make this argument against the GPL now had not trouble making the argument a few years ago that governments should pay for software development in the private sector and then leave ownership of that software with the companies that developed it.
What should I do??
You should improve your reading comprehension; there is no indication in this article that IBM endorses this action, or even knows about it. They just happen to be a member of the organization that does, one of over 1000 members.