My response was to the anonymous coward who replied to you (who argued with your statement that Thomson claimed that the Zotero developers had reverse engineered EndNote).
They are claiming that the defendants contracted not to reverse-engineer Endnotes and then did so, breaching the contract.
They haven't
They have:
21. On information and belief, GMU reverse engineered or decompiled the EndNote Software and proprietary.ens style files contained within the EndNote Software (emphasis mine)
While there are some style files included with EndNote, there are many user-created styles & Thomson makes MANY more styles available with no stated license and third parties (individual EndNote users) have created many more over the years. EndNote cannot claim a EULA on a file format (especially one that many people and institutions have created and distributed) & nobody has shown evidence that the EULA on the software has been violated through the decompilation of EndNote (because that never happened).
The code that you link to is in beta software and does not export a stand-alone CSL file. I know of no CSL file that has ever been publicly distributed that was derived from an.ens file.
That is fair. And my zealousness hasn't made me write a check to the Commonwealth of Virginia. To be honest, I don't know what VA will do with this case or how the trial will work. VA is being sued simply because GMU is a state university. Will they really have a "blank check" (e.g. as many tax-payer funds that are needed) to defend this with any external counsel and experts that they wish to employ?
I hoped that I kept the article summary relatively free of my personal opinion, which I will indulge in this comment:
Thomson Reuters has too many asshats.
Let us set aside the fact that academic software and those who develop academic software should embrace interoperability and knowledge sharing.
I'll even set aside that, despite the (rewritten) title, Zotero has many fundamental differences from EndNote.
The complaint is, in the words of Bruce D'Arcus, "a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate." Zotero's style repository contains no EndNote.ens styles and seems to contain no styles derived from those styles. CSL styles are created manually and through an online style creator. There is no way to get a new CSL style from an.ens file--the Zotero beta had mapped fields internally to allow.ens files to be used independently of CSL (but even this feature has been disabled in the trunk). Zotero thought about copyright issues surrounding this feature and came to the right decision--not to distribute.ens files or.csl files derived from.ens files, but to retain the feature to work with user-provided.ens files (similar to the way OpenOffice.org can open and save MS Office files).
I have decided not to purchase EndNote and I am asking my employer to do the same, unless the suit is dropped. I intend to donate at least as much as an EndNote license costs to George Mason University, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or any other applicable entity that both defends Zotero in this case and solicits donations. (I don't know any organization who has stepped in on this case yet, but I imagine that one of these organizations can provide some sort of legal support in the future.)
I encourage you to stop purchasing Thomson products too. There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms (some proprietary, some free/open source) that you can choose instead, not the least of which is Zotero.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of refbase, a free and open source reference manager that might be seen to compete with Thomson Reuters's EndNoteWeb. I have and continue to use many reference managers. While I have many technical complaints about the EndNote products, they aren't the worst technical products. Thomson may be the worst socially, though--in addition to inane and baseless lawsuits, they are very slow to respond to general feedback.
Just pick a standard OSI license, tell people who want to cite it how they can, and trust that it will work out. Don't try to force people to use your software in any peculiar way, even if that way does not seem "evil."
I asked a related question here several years ago. I have completed my schooling and released some open source software, some of which has been used and cited.
Copyright licenses generally protect holders from having others distribute their works in a way that they do not want. They do not place many restrictions on how the legally obtained work can be used. You might be able to use an end user license agreement that attempts to mandate citation & worse restrictions (such as not being able to publish software benchmarks) have certainly been imposed. Some authors even mandate registration before others can receive the source code & can then see who may be using but not citing their software. But I think this may actually be counterproductive & it certainly wouldn't be considered free software.
Academic integrity necessitates describing your work accurately in such a way that others can reproduce it. To do this, others will need to say what software they used to obtain the results they publish & they should choose to cite you. This won't always happen, but it will probably happen more frequently than you or your advisor think. It is certainly valid to write or call other academics who you know use your program and ask that they cite your paper in the future. In extreme situations, you can send a note to the editor of the journal that considers such papers that didn't cite your work & most editors will err on the side of strongly encouraging authors to add a citation.
Most other free/open source software that is used a lot in the sciences does not have a EULA of the type you subscribe, yet many are popular & are cited. They may have a FAQ entry or a mention in their README on what should be cited, but they don't try to make it legally binding.
You should ask yourself why you want to release it as free and open source software. Presumably, you hope that others will use it (obscurity is a worse threat than piracy) & maybe even to help you improve it. You also probably want to obtain some kind of academic prestige (which can come not only in the form of citation, but also from name recognition of both the program and the authors of that software). The best way to get this to happen is to write a solid piece of work that can do something that other works that cost (financially, time invested, and responsibilities involved) the same or less can't do as well and that other people want to do. Use a standard FSF/DFSG/OSI license (such as the GPL) & trust that everything else will work out. Getting quirky will discourage use of your software.
Then you should have put this as a requirement in your query. But I would ask WHY you want a gui? Backups should be set-and-forget! My USB sticks have multi-platform autorun scripts to execute my backup. I only need an interface if I choose to expand or shrink the backup set--I can edit a text file that has the list of what to exclude.
and that was easier to put on a portable hard drive than Python.
Bush proposes a budget & Congress can approve it. While some might gripe with some of Bush's funding choices, one of the most significant issues is that Congress has not passed the funding he has proposed. Instead, we are left with continuing resolutions where science is often left under funded.
Check out my URL--it has links to projects I've donated to over the past couple of years & links to others I plan to donate to. Donation doesn't have to be a one time thing and you can eventually donate to many important projects. Just think of how much you're saving on proprietary software & divide it across dozens of projects.
I won't debate whether full or responsible disclosure would be best for everyone.
I will suggest that there should be consistency & Debian believes in responsible disclosure.
Debian maintains a private security reporting mechanism & tells developers that some security bugs may be private for some length of time. Indeed, the Debian dev who closed that issue expressed apologies for not contacting the appropriate person.
Even those who do not believe in responsible disclosure will usually have the good manners to at least simultaneously contact developers and go public.
From what I can see in the announcement, it is merely a security update from version 4.9
I don't know why you say "merely;" I'd rather know about security updates instead of new features. But perhaps you're trying to provoke a conversation on the unusual version numbering employed by OpenSSH? Because of the nature of the program, many releases have security fixes. If you want to see some recent features, look at the release notes for 4.9.
The only change over 4.9 is a security fix for an issue that allowed local users to hijack forwarded X sessions. The release notes criticize Debian devs for disclosing this publicly before trying to contact OpenSSH privately.
We can object to anything we want. We just won't get very far in a legal fight without trademark protection. But communities do adopt ontologies that make the use of even non-trademarked words consistent within that community.
to a non-trademarked, commonly used phrase such as "open source"
By and large, the way the slashdot community (and, indeed, all of the Open Source Developer's Network sites) uses the term "open source" is that it is free/libre/open source software that conforms to the definitions set forth by the DFSG, FSF, and the OSI.
For an article to be posted that does not conform to this is a bit unsettling, which is why you see so many valid and reasonable posts here stating that this is NOT open source.
This implies that the proposed budget is very low in science. It isn't. It is very good for the physical sciences (with double-digit percentage increases to many agencies).
You might have a point if the post were titled "Yeah, but...." & the text were "even with funding, Bush isn't pro-science."
It is true that Bush does not make policy decisions based on scientific research and it is true that some of his personal beliefs run counter to current scientific understanding. This has impacted what science gets funded (as many ex-pat stem cell researchers now in Singapore would tell you).
However, Bush has budgeted to give science in general quite a bit more funding than what Congress has been willing to sign. He proposed large increases last year, which got cut by Congress & his proposed increases in the physical science this year are actually quite good. (Good enough that surely some think that it isn't fiscally conservative.)
I'm personally writing my representatives in Congress asking them to not slash the proposed increases as they have done in the past.
I don't use gentoo much anymore, but I did not too long ago.
1. Package system becoming VERY VERY slow because of the amount db size.
Robins claims there was also a bug in a recent portage version that slowed things down quite a bit.
4. No automatic way to uninstall a package and have the system automatically remove the unused ones.
Like:
$ emerge -C [packagename] && emerge --depclean
or do you mean something else?
5. Very very slow upgrade cycle for major packages (KDE is a good example)
Do you mean slow time to see updated ebuilds or that it takes a long time to compile? 3.58 is in the repos & there is a 4.0 overlay. Think there are even cvs ebuilds floating around.
If getting immediate total cooperation from everybody in a decentralized system at once was easy, we'd save a lot more than $5/month for our cable listings. Tribune Media Systems and Gemstar, who are the only two companies to compile the listings have a financial incentives to continue charging for the service. Their services fulfill the needs of a very large percentage of the customers of the cable channels. The channels won't take an action that costs them money & reaps little return. Even if there would be a greater return, not every station would make the switch & some would get it wrong.
Suck it up and use Schedules Direct just like everyoneelse. It isn't free. The opening cost is $15/3 month (with a 7 day trial). However, compiling schedules is not free. SD purchases them Tribune Media Services. But SD is a nonprofit company & they are free/open source friendly, having been formed by people involved with MythTV, XMLTV, and MacProgramGuide. I can think of worse places to send my money.
Free/open source PVRs are more functional than most proprietary competitors & the software itself will always be not only gratis, but free as in speech. If you want the cheapest possible service, you'll do better to get something with a lifetime subscription to guide content. But I prefer my freedom to a full pocketbook.
It'd be nice if the guide data would eventually become free/open. But who's going to provide it?
If you don't like SD, I guess you can try their competitor (if they ever release something for Linux). Or screen scrape for no cost.
I have some issues running synergy on a machine with more than 1 core/cpu.
What issues? I run it daily on an x86-64 Linux box with two cores (self compiled) & occasionally use it on a few win32 boxes that have two processors. No real complaints (except for copy issues). But I don't run the server component at all times & don't use more than two machines, so haven't really stressed it.
Slipstreaming, so far as I understand, solves only installation (or, at the least, would not be as space-efficient as a tool that was only for updates).
WSUS still requires a network.
There are non-networked PCs or PCs with slow/intermittent network connections that must be kept updated too. AutoPatcher addressed this niche quite well. So what to use instead?
Microsoft will only allow updates to be downloaded from its own servers.
That's certainly MS's right. A technical objection is that one could use cryptographic hashes/signing so that the download source wouldn't matter (and wouldn't it be caveat emptor if users didn't go to MS for updates?), but c'est la vie.
But why can't we make this even vaguely win-win? Provide a utility that will download ALL of these updates (whether the machine thought they were applied or not) directly from MS for use on removable media.
What alternatives are there for those on dial up (or other cases of no or intermittent network connection)? For those who have had malware make edits to their hosts file and/or browser security settings that make obtaining updates directly from MS on the computer they're updating difficult?
Interesting post--I agree with the sentiment expressed by mutt that all email clients suck, but do agree with you that thunderbird has done enough right that it is a good choice. While I'd certainly like to see improvements, I was surprised by some of your gripes:
Search [sucks] too.
Really? It has better IMAP searching than most other clients out there. Now the lack of a local index and/or a slow IMAP server might make searching somewhat slow, but nearly any desktop search program should take care of any locally archived mail better than 99$ of alternative email clients out there anyway.
No support for user tags (no, the "tags" they included in 2.0 (which were there in previous versions) does not count as support for tags).
What? Pre-2.0 had the same set of default tags, but had no real way to customize them or to define shortcuts to them & I think the colorchanging was more tedious. User-defined tags do work now and didn't work with 1.0.
However: perhaps they could make the interface even cleaner (add a tag browser + make it quicker to assign a newly defined tag to a post or to mass tag posts--zotero could serve as inspiration).
Poor support of non-english characters. etc.
Can you clarify? It seems to support all the same character sets Firefox supports. I do receive foreign email & haven't had any complaints. I don't write too much in other character sets, but the only gripe I've had when I've done so is warnings from enigmail (GPG) that non-latin encodings may not work (at which point I could choose to send it anyway, change the encoding, or turn off enigmail).
I have several coworkers who write in Chinese, Tamil, Russian, and many other nonenglish languages. Internationalization/locales might not be perfect, but it seems to be as good as any other app.
Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries,
But SQLite is in Firefox 2.0 (and is already leveraged by extensions like Zotero). If Mozilla wanted to have the feature in the 2.x branch, I think they technically could (or, if a developer wanted to write an extension that allowed Firefox 2 to see both the old bookmarks and the new ones, there doesn't seem to be any critical impediments).
However, the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite doesn't yet have SQLite. Will it be unable to share bookmarks with the new Firefox? Or will it get SQLite before Firefox 3 is released?
These machines also come with dedicated video cards, as the integrated video isn't supported very well by Ubuntu. So you are STARTING OUT with a better base model than the Windows base model. (Which also explains why the Linux laptop is more expensive than the Windows one.)
According to TFA, the Linux laptop is $100 LESS expensive than the Windows one. This is GREAT news (despite being an entry model). While Compaq and Lenovo have had Linux laptops, they've been more expensive than the Windows ones. Indeed, if any machine SHOULD have been more expensive w/ Linux, it should have been the laptop--hardware support for these is more finicky & some Linux enthusiasts have shown a willingness to pay a bit more (when they could have paid the Windows tax & done an OS install themselves).
Furthermore, I believe the default config will have integrated video (which has open sourced drivers). You will probably have the option to upgrade to an nvidia card. (But the specs aren't official yet, so this is speculation based on what had been on Dell's wiki & official statements they've made saying they'll use F/OSS drivers.)
Slashdot Mirror
My response was to the anonymous coward who replied to you (who argued with your statement that Thomson claimed that the Zotero developers had reverse engineered EndNote).
They have:
21. On information and belief, GMU reverse engineered or decompiled the EndNote Software and proprietary .ens style files contained within the EndNote Software (emphasis mine)
While there are some style files included with EndNote, there are many user-created styles & Thomson makes MANY more styles available with no stated license and third parties (individual EndNote users) have created many more over the years. EndNote cannot claim a EULA on a file format (especially one that many people and institutions have created and distributed) & nobody has shown evidence that the EULA on the software has been violated through the decompilation of EndNote (because that never happened).
The code that you link to is in beta software and does not export a stand-alone CSL file. I know of no CSL file that has ever been publicly distributed that was derived from an .ens file.
That is fair. And my zealousness hasn't made me write a check to the Commonwealth of Virginia. To be honest, I don't know what VA will do with this case or how the trial will work. VA is being sued simply because GMU is a state university. Will they really have a "blank check" (e.g. as many tax-payer funds that are needed) to defend this with any external counsel and experts that they wish to employ?
I hoped that I kept the article summary relatively free of my personal opinion, which I will indulge in this comment:
Thomson Reuters has too many asshats.
Let us set aside the fact that academic software and those who develop academic software should embrace interoperability and knowledge sharing.
I'll even set aside that, despite the (rewritten) title, Zotero has many fundamental differences from EndNote.
The complaint is, in the words of Bruce D'Arcus, "a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate." Zotero's style repository contains no EndNote .ens styles and seems to contain no styles derived from those styles. CSL styles are created manually and through an online style creator. There is no way to get a new CSL style from an .ens file--the Zotero beta had mapped fields internally to allow .ens files to be used independently of CSL (but even this feature has been disabled in the trunk). Zotero thought about copyright issues surrounding this feature and came to the right decision--not to distribute .ens files or .csl files derived from .ens files, but to retain the feature to work with user-provided .ens files (similar to the way OpenOffice.org can open and save MS Office files).
I have decided not to purchase EndNote and I am asking my employer to do the same, unless the suit is dropped. I intend to donate at least as much as an EndNote license costs to George Mason University, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or any other applicable entity that both defends Zotero in this case and solicits donations. (I don't know any organization who has stepped in on this case yet, but I imagine that one of these organizations can provide some sort of legal support in the future.)
I encourage you to stop purchasing Thomson products too. There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms (some proprietary, some free/open source) that you can choose instead, not the least of which is Zotero.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of refbase, a free and open source reference manager that might be seen to compete with Thomson Reuters's EndNoteWeb. I have and continue to use many reference managers. While I have many technical complaints about the EndNote products, they aren't the worst technical products. Thomson may be the worst socially, though--in addition to inane and baseless lawsuits, they are very slow to respond to general feedback.
Just pick a standard OSI license, tell people who want to cite it how they can, and trust that it will work out. Don't try to force people to use your software in any peculiar way, even if that way does not seem "evil."
I asked a related question here several years ago. I have completed my schooling and released some open source software, some of which has been used and cited.
Copyright licenses generally protect holders from having others distribute their works in a way that they do not want. They do not place many restrictions on how the legally obtained work can be used. You might be able to use an end user license agreement that attempts to mandate citation & worse restrictions (such as not being able to publish software benchmarks) have certainly been imposed. Some authors even mandate registration before others can receive the source code & can then see who may be using but not citing their software. But I think this may actually be counterproductive & it certainly wouldn't be considered free software.
Academic integrity necessitates describing your work accurately in such a way that others can reproduce it. To do this, others will need to say what software they used to obtain the results they publish & they should choose to cite you. This won't always happen, but it will probably happen more frequently than you or your advisor think. It is certainly valid to write or call other academics who you know use your program and ask that they cite your paper in the future. In extreme situations, you can send a note to the editor of the journal that considers such papers that didn't cite your work & most editors will err on the side of strongly encouraging authors to add a citation.
Most other free/open source software that is used a lot in the sciences does not have a EULA of the type you subscribe, yet many are popular & are cited. They may have a FAQ entry or a mention in their README on what should be cited, but they don't try to make it legally binding.
You should ask yourself why you want to release it as free and open source software. Presumably, you hope that others will use it (obscurity is a worse threat than piracy) & maybe even to help you improve it. You also probably want to obtain some kind of academic prestige (which can come not only in the form of citation, but also from name recognition of both the program and the authors of that software). The best way to get this to happen is to write a solid piece of work that can do something that other works that cost (financially, time invested, and responsibilities involved) the same or less can't do as well and that other people want to do. Use a standard FSF/DFSG/OSI license (such as the GPL) & trust that everything else will work out. Getting quirky will discourage use of your software.
Then you should have put this as a requirement in your query. But I would ask WHY you want a gui? Backups should be set-and-forget! My USB sticks have multi-platform autorun scripts to execute my backup. I only need an interface if I choose to expand or shrink the backup set--I can edit a text file that has the list of what to exclude.
Python is pretty easy to put on a portable hard drive and there are multiple portable versions.
Bush proposes a budget & Congress can approve it. While some might gripe with some of Bush's funding choices, one of the most significant issues is that Congress has not passed the funding he has proposed. Instead, we are left with continuing resolutions where science is often left under funded.
Check out my URL--it has links to projects I've donated to over the past couple of years & links to others I plan to donate to. Donation doesn't have to be a one time thing and you can eventually donate to many important projects. Just think of how much you're saving on proprietary software & divide it across dozens of projects.
I won't debate whether full or responsible disclosure would be best for everyone.
I will suggest that there should be consistency & Debian believes in responsible disclosure.
Debian maintains a private security reporting mechanism & tells developers that some security bugs may be private for some length of time. Indeed, the Debian dev who closed that issue expressed apologies for not contacting the appropriate person.
Even those who do not believe in responsible disclosure will usually have the good manners to at least simultaneously contact developers and go public.
The only change over 4.9 is a security fix for an issue that allowed local users to hijack forwarded X sessions. The release notes criticize Debian devs for disclosing this publicly before trying to contact OpenSSH privately.
The OP titled his post "Is it a surprise?"
This implies that the proposed budget is very low in science. It isn't. It is very good for the physical sciences (with double-digit percentage increases to many agencies).
You might have a point if the post were titled "Yeah, but...." & the text were "even with funding, Bush isn't pro-science."
It is true that Bush does not make policy decisions based on scientific research and it is true that some of his personal beliefs run counter to current scientific understanding. This has impacted what science gets funded (as many ex-pat stem cell researchers now in Singapore would tell you).
However, Bush has budgeted to give science in general quite a bit more funding than what Congress has been willing to sign. He proposed large increases last year, which got cut by Congress & his proposed increases in the physical science this year are actually quite good. (Good enough that surely some think that it isn't fiscally conservative.)
I'm personally writing my representatives in Congress asking them to not slash the proposed increases as they have done in the past.
If getting immediate total cooperation from everybody in a decentralized system at once was easy, we'd save a lot more than $5/month for our cable listings. Tribune Media Systems and Gemstar, who are the only two companies to compile the listings have a financial incentives to continue charging for the service. Their services fulfill the needs of a very large percentage of the customers of the cable channels. The channels won't take an action that costs them money & reaps little return. Even if there would be a greater return, not every station would make the switch & some would get it wrong.
Suck it up and use Schedules Direct just like everyone else. It isn't free. The opening cost is $15/3 month (with a 7 day trial). However, compiling schedules is not free. SD purchases them Tribune Media Services. But SD is a nonprofit company & they are free/open source friendly, having been formed by people involved with MythTV, XMLTV, and MacProgramGuide. I can think of worse places to send my money.
Free/open source PVRs are more functional than most proprietary competitors & the software itself will always be not only gratis, but free as in speech. If you want the cheapest possible service, you'll do better to get something with a lifetime subscription to guide content. But I prefer my freedom to a full pocketbook.
It'd be nice if the guide data would eventually become free/open. But who's going to provide it?
If you don't like SD, I guess you can try their competitor (if they ever release something for Linux). Or screen scrape for no cost.
Slipstreaming, so far as I understand, solves only installation (or, at the least, would not be as space-efficient as a tool that was only for updates).
WSUS still requires a network.
There are non-networked PCs or PCs with slow/intermittent network connections that must be kept updated too. AutoPatcher addressed this niche quite well. So what to use instead?
But why can't we make this even vaguely win-win? Provide a utility that will download ALL of these updates (whether the machine thought they were applied or not) directly from MS for use on removable media.
What alternatives are there for those on dial up (or other cases of no or intermittent network connection)? For those who have had malware make edits to their hosts file and/or browser security settings that make obtaining updates directly from MS on the computer they're updating difficult?
However: perhaps they could make the interface even cleaner (add a tag browser + make it quicker to assign a newly defined tag to a post or to mass tag posts--zotero could serve as inspiration).Can you clarify? It seems to support all the same character sets Firefox supports. I do receive foreign email & haven't had any complaints. I don't write too much in other character sets, but the only gripe I've had when I've done so is warnings from enigmail (GPG) that non-latin encodings may not work (at which point I could choose to send it anyway, change the encoding, or turn off enigmail).
I have several coworkers who write in Chinese, Tamil, Russian, and many other nonenglish languages. Internationalization/locales might not be perfect, but it seems to be as good as any other app.
However, the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite doesn't yet have SQLite. Will it be unable to share bookmarks with the new Firefox? Or will it get SQLite before Firefox 3 is released?
Furthermore, I believe the default config will have integrated video (which has open sourced drivers). You will probably have the option to upgrade to an nvidia card. (But the specs aren't official yet, so this is speculation based on what had been on Dell's wiki & official statements they've made saying they'll use F/OSS drivers.)