K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows
Just for your information, there's a thing called "Qt non-commercial edition for Microsoft Windows" which you don't have to pay anything to use on Windows. Yes it's dated, but it's free as in free beer if $$$ is the primary concern for you.
Likely, someone would buy the company and all of its assets, seeing a very profitable future in owning the rights to a popular language, OS, and hardware platform.
If you really like monospace, learn japanese, chinese, or something. All those ideographic characters are fit onto a regular grid. Not hard on the eyes or odd looking at all. (except when you go to insert those foreign latin characters)
Go to Japan. Buy ANY of the newspapers. You'll immediately understand that the font for all of these latin characters is beautifully designed in such a way that the width of latin characters are either equal to or half of the width of Japanese domestic characters. They perfectly fit in the grid-like visual structure of traditional Japanese printing system. They don't look odd at all.
... nor the choice of the license should not be questioned here. The author has chosen whatever license that pleases him/her most, and if I want to use their code I respect the license terms of THEIR choice. Or, of course, I can choose not to use their code at all.
This is the principle of these license thingie, and, as such, is irrelevant of the choice of license. Please do not start "which is more suitable for this purpose" kind of frame, as it is irrelevant. Though many say that one can do whatever they want to the code released under BSD license, that's not true.
For example, if you take my BSD-licensed code, remove the "disclaimer" terms, and redistribute with or without fees, that's a clear violation of license terms (and I'm in a potential risk of being sued by somebody who doesn't know that the original work of mine has disclaimer terms) so I'll have to bite you.
I happen to prefer BSD license over the GPL when I release codes that are only personally developed by myself (for my own reason), by the way, so please understand that I'm not attacking you based on your bias towards BSD license.
Let me repeat again: If someone disrespects the licensing terms (be it GPL or BSD license or proprietary), that's bad because he's violating these terms.
Symbian is NOT an open system by most free/open source followers standards.
I'd say Symbian is more "open" in some areas, while it is as open as MS in other areas.
On one hand everybody is allowed to look at the source of Eikon, the GUI layer of the operating system of Psion, without paying anything. Also you can see the entire sourcecode of their built-in word processor application. OK it's not opensource, but I appreciate their generous offer.
On the other hand, as far as any kernel-side things are concerned, Psion always behave like control freak. You cannot write ANY driver without paying amrs and legs. I'm not talking about the reasonable fee like several hundred dollars or 1000.
As a result, there's not a single third-party driver for PCMCIA devices for Psion range of palmtops. None.
Also, as someone else already wrote, they've been quite insistent on NOT supplying any information about the serialization of the built-in applications, making it extremely hard for anybody to write file converter for any other platform than Windows.
That isn't even a valid point. Qt 2.3 for Win32, free.
Well this is probably a bit off topic, but the Qt Non Commercial Edition for Microsoft Windows is covered by the license called Qt NON-COMMERCIAL LICENSE version 1.0. It specifically states that you are allowed to develop software using QT "in a non-commercial setting". Though the definition of "non-commercial" is not found in the license itself, another page
says that:
"A non-commercial setting means that you must not use the package in the course of your employment or whilst engaged in activities that will be compensated. A non-commercial application is an application that cannot be sold, leased, rented or otherwise distributed for recompense."
My question is, why another license? I actually like QT. I use KDE every day and I write for QT for my private purpose. And I don't care if they charge billion dollars for Windows version. But why did they HAVE TO create yet another license that pose such a strong restriction like "you cannot earn even 1 cent using this software" when it seems (at least to me) that the GPL would have sufficed (and less restrictive)? Would somebody please enlighten?
They haven't changed the license. What they changed is the code.
The GPL is still OSD-compliant as far as I can see. OSD says that you don't prohibit anybody to use/modify/redistribute your code. You removed SCO support? Fine. Anybody can take your code, modify it to reimplement SCO support and then redistribute, because the GPL explicitly allows that. What's incompatible?
I've always had doubts about the enforceability of the GPL in court.
Have you read the actual IBM's claims? It seems to me that you're discussing non-existing issue. Here's a relevant part of the claim:
IBM is entitled to an award of damages
in an amount to be determined at trial and to an injunction prohibiting
SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL.
You see, nobody (except some/. crowd) is claiming that the court should force SCO to give away all of their code (if any) under the GPL. All IBM wants is "award of damages" and "injunction". What they're saying is that IBM is one of the contributors of GPL-ed code, and SCO has redistributed all these GPL-ed codes without respecting the GPL, and thus IBM has certain right to claim as one of the copyright holders.
As a matter of fact, I think it's the beauty of the GPL that you don't have to worry about such things as the "enforcability of the GPL in court". It doesn't matter if it is enforcable or not.
The GPL is to allow something that is otherwise prohibited, and when something nasty happens, the punishment-part is taken care by the normal copyright law (or some other existing law, whatever it is).
If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license. As the stakes continue to rise in the Linux battles, it becomes increasingly clear that the core issue is bigger than SCO, Red Hat, or even IBM. The core issue is about the value of intellectual property in an Internet age.
Not convincing. SCO's shouting loud as if the problem is in GPL and free software and open source, but that seems to me to be definitely a false claim intentionally made-up to confuse people.
This is not a GPL problem. This is not an open-source problem. This is not even a problem of certain kind of license (be it Free or Open or proprietary).
Just imagine (only at the moment) that IBM breached some of its contract terms with SCO and released the "stolen" code, NOT under the GPL, but under some proprietary license where you as a customer never see the source and still have to pay $100000 to use the binary. SCO can (and has to) sue IBM to collect damage. Is this any worse or better than the current situation where IBM used GPL? Probably that would affect the amount of damage (don't know in which direction), but if SCO can collect damage that doesn't matter.
So, even if SCO has something, it's only IBM playing dirty, and that should be all (from SCO's point of view). Not at all a problem of GPL.
It seems that SCO wants to make free software/open-source movement look as disrespectable as possible, for some reason.
As far as you're using the word "you" as a synonym for IBM, you're right. However, we have to remember that SCO has done nothing to minimize the damage.
If you say "hey, you're doing something nasty and that's causing me 5000$ damage per hour", my guess is that your best interest is first in stopping me and then in recovering damage (by suing me or whatever). You should be willing to tell me what's the offending action of mine so that I can stop that easily (whatever it is) to minimize the damage. After that, you can still sue me to collect the damage.
Instead, SCO is just sitting there, watching the damage to increase automatically, while on the other hand threatening people with pay-or-sue kind of words. I guess that's the tactics of SCO to make that gazillion USD number seem a bit more credible in court.
If there's some real damage, they have to at least try to minimize it. It's not that they have never had any opportunity!
Slashdot Mirror
Just for your information, there's a thing called "Qt non-commercial edition for Microsoft Windows" which you don't have to pay anything to use on Windows. Yes it's dated, but it's free as in free beer if $$$ is the primary concern for you.
Ah, like Microsoft?
According to the article,
"REXX is a procedural language that allows programs and algorithms to be written in a clear and structured way."
At least one of the implementations has been ported to tons of platforms and, to me, it doesn't seem to be dead.
Go to Japan. Buy ANY of the newspapers. You'll immediately understand that the font for all of these latin characters is beautifully designed in such a way that the width of latin characters are either equal to or half of the width of Japanese domestic characters. They perfectly fit in the grid-like visual structure of traditional Japanese printing system. They don't look odd at all.
I wanted to say "... nor the choice of the license shoud be questioned here".
... nor the choice of the license should not be questioned here. The author has chosen whatever license that pleases him/her most, and if I want to use their code I respect the license terms of THEIR choice. Or, of course, I can choose not to use their code at all.
This is the principle of these license thingie, and, as such, is irrelevant of the choice of license. Please do not start "which is more suitable for this purpose" kind of frame, as it is irrelevant. Though many say that one can do whatever they want to the code released under BSD license, that's not true.
For example, if you take my BSD-licensed code, remove the "disclaimer" terms, and redistribute with or without fees, that's a clear violation of license terms (and I'm in a potential risk of being sued by somebody who doesn't know that the original work of mine has disclaimer terms) so I'll have to bite you.
I happen to prefer BSD license over the GPL when I release codes that are only personally developed by myself (for my own reason), by the way, so please understand that I'm not attacking you based on your bias towards BSD license. Let me repeat again: If someone disrespects the licensing terms (be it GPL or BSD license or proprietary), that's bad because he's violating these terms.
I'd say Symbian is more "open" in some areas, while it is as open as MS in other areas.
On one hand everybody is allowed to look at the source of Eikon, the GUI layer of the operating system of Psion, without paying anything. Also you can see the entire sourcecode of their built-in word processor application. OK it's not opensource, but I appreciate their generous offer.
On the other hand, as far as any kernel-side things are concerned, Psion always behave like control freak. You cannot write ANY driver without paying amrs and legs. I'm not talking about the reasonable fee like several hundred dollars or 1000. As a result, there's not a single third-party driver for PCMCIA devices for Psion range of palmtops. None.
Also, as someone else already wrote, they've been quite insistent on NOT supplying any information about the serialization of the built-in applications, making it extremely hard for anybody to write file converter for any other platform than Windows.
That isn't even a valid point. Qt 2.3 for Win32, free.
Well this is probably a bit off topic, but the Qt Non Commercial Edition for Microsoft Windows is covered by the license called Qt NON-COMMERCIAL LICENSE version 1.0. It specifically states that you are allowed to develop software using QT "in a non-commercial setting". Though the definition of "non-commercial" is not found in the license itself, another page says that:
"A non-commercial setting means that you must not use the package in the course of your employment or whilst engaged in activities that will be compensated. A non-commercial application is an application that cannot be sold, leased, rented or otherwise distributed for recompense."
My question is, why another license? I actually like QT. I use KDE every day and I write for QT for my private purpose. And I don't care if they charge billion dollars for Windows version. But why did they HAVE TO create yet another license that pose such a strong restriction like "you cannot earn even 1 cent using this software" when it seems (at least to me) that the GPL would have sufficed (and less restrictive)? Would somebody please enlighten?
They haven't changed the license. What they changed is the code.
The GPL is still OSD-compliant as far as I can see. OSD says that you don't prohibit anybody to use/modify/redistribute your code. You removed SCO support? Fine. Anybody can take your code, modify it to reimplement SCO support and then redistribute, because the GPL explicitly allows that. What's incompatible?
I've always had doubts about the enforceability of the GPL in court.
Have you read the actual IBM's claims? It seems to me that you're discussing non-existing issue. Here's a relevant part of the claim:
IBM is entitled to an award of damages in an amount to be determined at trial and to an injunction prohibiting SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL.
You see, nobody (except some /. crowd) is claiming that the court should force SCO to give away all of their code (if any) under the GPL. All IBM wants is "award of damages" and "injunction". What they're saying is that IBM is one of the contributors of GPL-ed code, and SCO has redistributed all these GPL-ed codes without respecting the GPL, and thus IBM has certain right to claim as one of the copyright holders.
As a matter of fact, I think it's the beauty of the GPL that you don't have to worry about such things as the "enforcability of the GPL in court". It doesn't matter if it is enforcable or not. The GPL is to allow something that is otherwise prohibited, and when something nasty happens, the punishment-part is taken care by the normal copyright law (or some other existing law, whatever it is).
If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license. As the stakes continue to rise in the Linux battles, it becomes increasingly clear that the core issue is bigger than SCO, Red Hat, or even IBM. The core issue is about the value of intellectual property in an Internet age.
Not convincing. SCO's shouting loud as if the problem is in GPL and free software and open source, but that seems to me to be definitely a false claim intentionally made-up to confuse people.
This is not a GPL problem. This is not an open-source problem. This is not even a problem of certain kind of license (be it Free or Open or proprietary).
Just imagine (only at the moment) that IBM breached some of its contract terms with SCO and released the "stolen" code, NOT under the GPL, but under some proprietary license where you as a customer never see the source and still have to pay $100000 to use the binary. SCO can (and has to) sue IBM to collect damage. Is this any worse or better than the current situation where IBM used GPL? Probably that would affect the amount of damage (don't know in which direction), but if SCO can collect damage that doesn't matter.
So, even if SCO has something, it's only IBM playing dirty, and that should be all (from SCO's point of view). Not at all a problem of GPL. It seems that SCO wants to make free software/open-source movement look as disrespectable as possible, for some reason.
As far as you're using the word "you" as a synonym for IBM, you're right. However, we have to remember that SCO has done nothing to minimize the damage.
If you say "hey, you're doing something nasty and that's causing me 5000$ damage per hour", my guess is that your best interest is first in stopping me and then in recovering damage (by suing me or whatever). You should be willing to tell me what's the offending action of mine so that I can stop that easily (whatever it is) to minimize the damage. After that, you can still sue me to collect the damage.
Instead, SCO is just sitting there, watching the damage to increase automatically, while on the other hand threatening people with pay-or-sue kind of words. I guess that's the tactics of SCO to make that gazillion USD number seem a bit more credible in court.
If there's some real damage, they have to at least try to minimize it. It's not that they have never had any opportunity!