The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
Douglas Adams is definitely fair-game for geek-speak. His writings are even well-read by non-geeks.
Systm had a video how-to of building a MythTV box. Having seen the short segment (and having assembled a PVR before it), I am surprised that the article is "Part 1."
The reason from PR has almost always been "lack of consumer interest," but there has been plenty of speculation that it is because of the low price point offered on processors for being an Intel-exclusive shop.
Depending on the box, I like putting a cheap router (those intended for DSL/Cable are fine for me since my backwards-university is still on 10Mbps & is talking about eventually going to 100MBps) or another box in front of the system. If it is another box, it is nice to make it a linux or BSD box which is configured to ONLY be a firewall. I like OpenBSD. You can use a LiveCD or install it outright. Lots of tutorials out there.
If you want only a software firewall for windows, I like Sygate. It does everything I want EXCEPT support fast-user switching.
That is an IBM Basic keyboard, which is a rubberdome keyboard. It probably isn't of much interest to most people.
The PC AT keyboards are most likely buckling spring (which is what makes that distinctive clicking sound). You can probably haw those on fleebay, as there are converters to allow them to be used via PS/2 (or, if you have a model with a detachable cord, you may just get PS/2 cords).
pckeyboard.com has boards with an integrated trackball and/or an ibm "nipple." They come in both the old buckling spring "clicky" layouts (which last forever) and in the quiet-key rubber-dome models most modern keyboards use.
I love my Model M. If you want new buckling spring boards, the place to get them is pckeyboard.com (which was actually linked in that wikipedia article). Not only do they have many ayouts (some with a windows key or even an integrated trackball or one of those nipples that is on the thinkpad), but they do custom builds.
A keyboard with LCDs on each key seems like it would be needlessly expensive. You can get full LCD-touch screens where you can make a keyboard, but even this has a very niche appeal: it doesn't give the same feedback of a regular keyboard and, of course, the LCD is prone to getting dirty & misregistering strokes (especially in a multiuser environment).
It might be cool to hack one of those virtual keyboards. You know, the ones that project the keys via a laser. This would be cheaper & more maintainable than LCDs, but still no feed-back.
For personal use & for the money, I'd just get an old IBM Model-M & put the keycaps in whatever order I wanted.
Nowhere in that post did I advise attempting to release the code in a way which violated the GPL. Keeping code in-house is not considered distribution.
If F/OSS is fine with your superiors then you don't have the same perspective as someone who doesn't. This entire discussion hinged on what to do if the powers-that-be DON'T like copyleft, for whatever reason they may have.
This is a fair point, but I describe my experience with multiple Universities, most of which have had the same generic contract for your ideas that nonlinear is worried about.
There is no better reason not to use the GPL than "you could be fired for doing so."
But you've yet to list people who have been fired from academia for using the GPL. You haven't even shown contracts which would tie your hands w.r.t. licensing (though even I have seen a few of those).
And, btw, there ARE universities that have written and sold software or other technologies to help fund themselves.
Sure. But there are probably more who have contributed open source projects (just because there's a lower threshold to do so). Most Universities do both.
He would probably be quite happy with BSD-style friendly universities
That's very speculative of you.
You're apparantly far too deep in the ivory tower to realize the difference between "law" and "politics."
This, too, could be fair criticism. But, in the most general sense, politics is an attempt to influence outcomes when multipe parties are affected. The sheer proliferation of licenses is proof enough that a one-size-fits-all legal contract is seen as inadequate. Even if you restrict politics to only involve social or economic motives, most licenses are very concerned with one or both of these
Licenses such as Microsoft's EULA, the BSD, the Mozilla license, and even Hasbro's Open Gaming License are all NOT politically motivated.
The GPL does aim for the proliferation of "Free" software. But I think only the rarest of idealists would think that it has the motive of subversing ALL software to be under that license (how one would ever achieve that end (and why they may want to) is beyond me).
But other license have motives extending beyond restricting the redistribution of the software. The original BSD license had a clause to advertise, thus promoting UC Berkeley.
The MS EULAs have MANY provisions with various motives. MS SQL's license prohibits publishing performance statistics without prior approval from Microsoft. Don't clauses like that also change the way the industry works? I certainly know that when I shopped for software before I read that EULA that I expected a right to publish and read fair and honest benchmarks!
The GPL, like all licenses, does dictate the rights and restrictions which apply to software. RMS may have a strong political agenda, but not all software developers who release under the GPL have the same agenda.
This would be the point where, like many GPL zealots, you might conclude that I'm an evil man against copyleft.
No--I assumed that when you spread FUD by saying you'd be or should be fired/slapped/whatever for using GPLed code in an academic setting. But I forgive you for not knowing the relative freedom in academia. Yes, one should read and understand and ask about the terms and conditions of his employment, though.
Thanks for putting me in the camp of GPL zealots. I am not sure if the true zealots will let a heathen who has already admitted to using and writing software under other licenses (even proprietary ones) stay for very long.
You're obviously far-removed from the ivory tower. There's nothing wrong with that, except that you don't know how it works in academia.
By distributing / publishing it without the GPL.
And where, precisely, did I advise doing that? As I said--follow the license by keeping your program in-house (which is perfectly legal and in accordance with the GPL) or distribute it under the GPL. I've never been told by the University or a funding agency to develop a program which will be distriuted or which is for-profit.
but you'll still be smacked by your boss.
Sorry, but no. Funding agencies want results. My University wants money from funding agencies and prestige (brought in the form of published papers in peer-reviewed journals) which will get them more money. F/OSS is fine with them: I get more work done is less amount of time by leveraging other software & allowing other researchers access to my software has a synergistic effect.
The GPL is a politically motivated license.
As are ALL licenses. As are arguments for and against any license.the "better thing" for you is a soft copyleft such as the BSD license.And you showd your political convictions against the GPL. That's fine: to each his own. I admit I like F/OSS and the GPL (see my URL above), but have used and contributed to proprietatry/closed source/commercial software (in addition to various GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MIT-style software).
(Aside: BSD is not usually referred to as copyleft. Copyleft normally refers to licenses which MUST be kept under a F/OSS license.)
Please realize this isn't the time or place to argue for/against the GPL. nonlnear wants to put his software under that license, and you won't change his mind.
Please also realize that when it IS time to argue against the GPL, you can make perfectly logical and ideological reasons for why one might choose it without telling blatent lies. Academics will, in general, not be fired for writing GPLed software unless their contract specifcally states that they are there to develop applications which are to be distributed under some other license. Nor are they committing plagiarism for merely using a F/OSS license. I certainly know of no cases where it has happened & suspect you're hard-pressed to come up with any as well.
because then you're certain that even if your university goes on to sell it for grant money and refuses to distribute the source, there won't be any heartache afterward.
Do you even know how grants are obtained?
And why would your University try to go on to sell GPLed software (violating copyright law & pissing off the faculty & possibly the sponsors to boot)?
Plagarism is when you publish or submit something and call it your own.
How, exactly, are you claiming the GPLed code as your own? Many academic papers I read in which the author created a derivative work from GPLed software make it explicit as to what there work is built on & I don't recall saying you should claim authorship for anyhting you didn't write.
Making a derivitive work, giving it someone else, and not using the GPL *IS* a violation of the GPL.
And that is why I (and Stallman before me) said it is a good way to release software under the GPL. If you start with GPLed software, you have two choices: keep it in house & don't release it (which many Universities and funding agencies are O.K. with) or release it under the GPL.
And if you have an agreement that keeps you from doing that,
As I said, I haven't seen many agreements to that effect in academia.
How many academic contracts can you show me which prevent you from starting with copyleft code?
How many academic contracts can you show me that prohibit the teacher from shitting on thier desk? Or stealing money from the administrator's pocket?
Oh. I guess you haven't seen many agreements to that effect either.
You, ah, DO realize that using GPL'd code without legal authority to release it is copyright infrigement
It appears to me that the OP wants to be a post doc or a professor at a University. Typically these people don't have the University administration telling them what to work on. Yes, there are agreements with the administration & with the funding agencies. But there is still a lot of latitude in what they work on. How many academic contracts can you show me which prevent you from starting with copyleft code?
The GPL itself allows you to make derivative works. It just dictates how you distribute those works.
otherwise known in the academic field as plagarism--correct?
Absolutely not. Plagiarism would be violating the GPL. Making a derivative work is not a violation. The ony thing you should have to worry about is the contracts with your University and funding agencies.
Your university or employer can and should expel/fire you if you try and force them to use a copyleft license they have no intention of using.
It is pragmatically different in the corporate world in that they DO force both a license and what you work on down your throat.
Just as they can and should expel/fire you if you try and submit "Noksagt Windows XP" as your final project.
That would be violating a trademark. Your working on GPL software is not breaking copyrights.
Still, asking both your University and funding agency for permission to start with GPLed code to accelerate production (and therefore getting more papers out sooner & research done sooner) is a good idea. Most Universities and funding agencies don't view every software project as something which will be sold & see papers & academic discoveries as the real ends. They will therefore be likely to give you permission so you can do your job.
The easiest way to force something under the GPL or other copyleft licenses is to make a derivative work from GPLed code. So consider using the GNU Scientific Library or something similar as your base. Your University will most likely not make you rewrite it and, if they have a legal department, will most likely not ask you to violate the GPL.
I do like ClamAV. But note that ClamWin doesn't include a real-time scanner. For a WAN-deployment, this is the recipe for a headache. Yes, you can schedule it to run nightly & can configure most email clients and download managers to send files to it first, but users do some dumb things & real-time scans have made less work for ME.
0.1 != 0.10. In versioning math,.10 is often bigger than.1. The 0.1 release was called "Phoenix" & happened in 2002.
Firefox 0.10 came 2 years later and was the so-called "preview release." and, though pre-1.0 was included and promoted as stable software on multiple platforms.
Yes, there is a difference between stable releases and unstable/testing/development releases. Firefox 0.10 was still made available to the public. If you don't want to consider it a "release," that is fine.
However, 1.0 was released on 2004-11-09, which is still before OS X.4.
It appears as though they will be including RSS support in Internet Explorer, which will come over a year and a half after the same technology was introduced in Apple's Safari RSS.
Safari had RSS in the release which came with Tiger (released 2005-04-29). Firefox had LiveBookmarks since release 0.10 (released 2004-09-13), and of course had it in extensions before then.
Even better deal: free issue AND $5 off
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 1
Use the links in parent post, but coupon code G5R2DY for 5 issues for only $30. Wish I knew that one when I subscribed!
The same can be said of ANY magazine subscription. Why buy playboy when there is free pr0n to be had?
Like playboy, you get editorial quality & some amount of community built up around the for-profit publication. Also like Playboy, you're also paying for a regular dose of what you like to peruse & for nicely bound dead trees which are useful to have on hand when you're actually trying to accomplish the task at hand.
Coupon, Amazon back-issues
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 1
I agree that it is a great magazine. Unless you have amazon cash to burn, the cheapest way to get it is direct. Use coupon code M5ZXML to get 5 issues for the price of 4 (~$35).
If you want back issues, amazon is your best bet (you can sometimes find them on half or ebay, but most people hang on to them. Issue 1 and Issue 2 are available. If you do want to use them for a subscription, subscription, you can get 4 issues for $35 and $5 off a future amazon order.
All of the amazon links have a short video & a 10 page excerpt from the magazine.
Your beef is with the great-grandparent of this post. I didn't agree/disagree that the GPL was what made OO.o successful. I merely debated the point that Sun had nothing to fear by putting OO.o under a GPL-compatible license.
However, I can play devil's advocate & say that the GPL has proven developer-buy-in and user-buy-in. Yes, some may not like copyleft licenses. But the truth is that corporations have already chosen GPLed-Linux over non-copyleft *BSD licenses.
I have no problems with the CDDL, but I doubt corps will switch from Linux to OpenSolaris. Most who would run Solaris already are running the commercial version.
Slashdot Mirror
Systm had a video how-to of building a MythTV box. Having seen the short segment (and having assembled a PVR before it), I am surprised that the article is "Part 1."
The reason from PR has almost always been "lack of consumer interest," but there has been plenty of speculation that it is because of the low price point offered on processors for being an Intel-exclusive shop.
Depending on the box, I like putting a cheap router (those intended for DSL/Cable are fine for me since my backwards-university is still on 10Mbps & is talking about eventually going to 100MBps) or another box in front of the system. If it is another box, it is nice to make it a linux or BSD box which is configured to ONLY be a firewall. I like OpenBSD. You can use a LiveCD or install it outright. Lots of tutorials out there.
If you want only a software firewall for windows, I like Sygate. It does everything I want EXCEPT support fast-user switching.
That is an IBM Basic keyboard, which is a rubberdome keyboard. It probably isn't of much interest to most people.
The PC AT keyboards are most likely buckling spring (which is what makes that distinctive clicking sound). You can probably haw those on fleebay, as there are converters to allow them to be used via PS/2 (or, if you have a model with a detachable cord, you may just get PS/2 cords).
pckeyboard.com has boards with an integrated trackball and/or an ibm "nipple." They come in both the old buckling spring "clicky" layouts (which last forever) and in the quiet-key rubber-dome models most modern keyboards use.
I love my Model M. If you want new buckling spring boards, the place to get them is pckeyboard.com (which was actually linked in that wikipedia article). Not only do they have many ayouts (some with a windows key or even an integrated trackball or one of those nipples that is on the thinkpad), but they do custom builds.
A keyboard with LCDs on each key seems like it would be needlessly expensive. You can get full LCD-touch screens where you can make a keyboard, but even this has a very niche appeal: it doesn't give the same feedback of a regular keyboard and, of course, the LCD is prone to getting dirty & misregistering strokes (especially in a multiuser environment).
It might be cool to hack one of those virtual keyboards. You know, the ones that project the keys via a laser. This would be cheaper & more maintainable than LCDs, but still no feed-back.
For personal use & for the money, I'd just get an old IBM Model-M & put the keycaps in whatever order I wanted.
Nowhere in that post did I advise attempting to release the code in a way which violated the GPL. Keeping code in-house is not considered distribution.
This is a fair point, but I describe my experience with multiple Universities, most of which have had the same generic contract for your ideas that nonlinear is worried about.
But you've yet to list people who have been fired from academia for using the GPL. You haven't even shown contracts which would tie your hands w.r.t. licensing (though even I have seen a few of those).
Sure. But there are probably more who have contributed open source projects (just because there's a lower threshold to do so). Most Universities do both.
That's very speculative of you.
This, too, could be fair criticism. But, in the most general sense, politics is an attempt to influence outcomes when multipe parties are affected. The sheer proliferation of licenses is proof enough that a one-size-fits-all legal contract is seen as inadequate. Even if you restrict politics to only involve social or economic motives, most licenses are very concerned with one or both of these
The GPL does aim for the proliferation of "Free" software. But I think only the rarest of idealists would think that it has the motive of subversing ALL software to be under that license (how one would ever achieve that end (and why they may want to) is beyond me).
But other license have motives extending beyond restricting the redistribution of the software. The original BSD license had a clause to advertise, thus promoting UC Berkeley.
The MS EULAs have MANY provisions with various motives. MS SQL's license prohibits publishing performance statistics without prior approval from
Microsoft. Don't clauses like that also change the way the industry works? I certainly know that when I shopped for software before I read that EULA that I expected a right to publish and read fair and honest benchmarks!
The GPL, like all licenses, does dictate the rights and restrictions which apply to software. RMS may have a strong political agenda, but not all software developers who release under the GPL have the same agenda.
No--I assumed that when you spread FUD by saying you'd be or should be fired/slapped/whatever for using GPLed code in an academic setting. But I forgive you for not knowing the relative freedom in academia. Yes, one should read and understand and ask about the terms and conditions of his employment, though.
Thanks for putting me in the camp of GPL zealots. I am not sure if the true zealots will let a heathen who has already admitted to using and writing software under other licenses (even proprietary ones) stay for very long.
(Aside: BSD is not usually referred to as copyleft. Copyleft normally refers to licenses which MUST be kept under a F/OSS license.)
Please realize this isn't the time or place to argue for/against the GPL. nonlnear wants to put his software under that license, and you won't change his mind.
Please also realize that when it IS time to argue against the GPL, you can make perfectly logical and ideological reasons for why one might choose it without telling blatent lies. Academics will, in general, not be fired for writing GPLed software unless their contract specifcally states that they are there to develop applications which are to be distributed under some other license. Nor are they committing plagiarism for merely using a F/OSS license. I certainly know of no cases where it has happened & suspect you're hard-pressed to come up with any as well.Do you even know how grants are obtained?
And why would your University try to go on to sell GPLed software (violating copyright law & pissing off the faculty & possibly the sponsors to boot)?
The GPL itself allows you to make derivative works. It just dictates how you distribute those works.Absolutely not. Plagiarism would be violating the GPL. Making a derivative work is not a violation. The ony thing you should have to worry about is the contracts with your University and funding agencies.It is pragmatically different in the corporate world in that they DO force both a license and what you work on down your throat.That would be violating a trademark. Your working on GPL software is not breaking copyrights.
Still, asking both your University and funding agency for permission to start with GPLed code to accelerate production (and therefore getting more papers out sooner & research done sooner) is a good idea. Most Universities and funding agencies don't view every software project as something which will be sold & see papers & academic discoveries as the real ends. They will therefore be likely to give you permission so you can do your job.
The easiest way to force something under the GPL or other copyleft licenses is to make a derivative work from GPLed code. So consider using the GNU Scientific Library or something similar as your base. Your University will most likely not make you rewrite it and, if they have a legal department, will most likely not ask you to violate the GPL.
For a good piece on GPL in academia, see Releasing Free Software if you work at a University by Richard Stallman.
I do like ClamAV. But note that ClamWin doesn't include a real-time scanner. For a WAN-deployment, this is the recipe for a headache. Yes, you can schedule it to run nightly & can configure most email clients and download managers to send files to it first, but users do some dumb things & real-time scans have made less work for ME.
0.1 != 0.10. In versioning math, .10 is often bigger than .1. The 0.1 release was called "Phoenix" & happened in 2002.
Firefox 0.10 came 2 years later and was the so-called "preview release." and, though pre-1.0 was included and promoted as stable software on multiple platforms.
Yes, there is a difference between stable releases and unstable/testing/development releases. Firefox 0.10 was still made available to the public. If you don't want to consider it a "release," that is fine.
However, 1.0 was released on 2004-11-09, which is still before OS X.4.
But, if we want to include prereleases: some could use Firefox's RSS on 2004-06-15, as there was a publicly-published patch (see bug 244078)(note: not linkied because mozilla's bugzilla doesn't like slashdot referrals.
Embrace and Extinguish (TM)
Use the links in parent post, but coupon code G5R2DY for 5 issues for only $30. Wish I knew that one when I subscribed!
The same can be said of ANY magazine subscription. Why buy playboy when there is free pr0n to be had?
Like playboy, you get editorial quality & some amount of community built up around the for-profit publication. Also like Playboy, you're also paying for a regular dose of what you like to peruse & for nicely bound dead trees which are useful to have on hand when you're actually trying to accomplish the task at hand.
I agree that it is a great magazine. Unless you have amazon cash to burn, the cheapest way to get it is direct. Use coupon code M5ZXML to get 5 issues for the price of 4 (~$35).
If you want back issues, amazon is your best bet (you can sometimes find them on half or ebay, but most people hang on to them. Issue 1 and Issue 2 are available. If you do want to use them for a subscription, subscription, you can get 4 issues for $35 and $5 off a future amazon order.
All of the amazon links have a short video & a 10 page excerpt from the magazine.
However, I can play devil's advocate & say that the GPL has proven developer-buy-in and user-buy-in. Yes, some may not like copyleft licenses. But the truth is that corporations have already chosen GPLed-Linux over non-copyleft *BSD licenses.
I have no problems with the CDDL, but I doubt corps will switch from Linux to OpenSolaris. Most who would run Solaris already are running the commercial version.
OO.o was released in July 2000. KOffice was started in 1998.
As a point of clarification, OO.o is under the LGPL and the SISSL. Obviously LGPL is GPL-compatible, but SISSL isn't (though it is still free).
This is in contrast to the CDDL of OpenSolaris, which is also GPL-incompatible.
When will the Sun compiler be released under the CDDL? Currently, Sun Studio is under a different license.