Sure I can't. I can license only MY code, which is under the GPL. If I want to use others' code released under other licenses and use the code in MY code I can't do that. The GPL doesn't allow it.
If you license your code GPL, you are allowed to violate the GPL when distributing it - its your copyright. Thus, you are allowed to license part of your program GPL, and part of it BSD, and have part of it even completely closed! Its your copyright.
This is, by the way, how nvidia binary kernel drivers work. They are not GPL, but linked against GPL. They simply wrote a GPL adapter for the kernel interface (it links with the kernel so it has to be GPL) and distributed their own code under a closed license and linked it with their GPL'd adapter.
If Windows was worse - it would have had a harder time becoming a monopoly and using the funds it receives to destroy BSD (and other open competitors) as best they could.
Second, build infrastructure that's obviously missing. There needs to be a central "registry". Let me rephrase that; a central key-value pair repository. Make it and let everybody know. Make sure drivers (X Server / Kernel) can talk to it and applications can talk to it and read/write.
Hey, it already exists! Its called the/etc/yourprogram and ~/.yourprogram directories, and it is far easier to access than the Windows implementation, with simple open/read/write calls!
We don't need more API fragmentation, we need less! Every new API that does the same thing just makes my tools less useful because there is another aspect of the system that they cannot access.
Language is what it is, and it changes over time, but I'd be really disappointed if this one was let to slip, because rather than the language changing because it's more convenient or better, it's changing because a group of powerful corporations want to confuse the issue for their own control and commercial benefit.
I used to think the same, but you can check modern dictionaries. The word theft already includes copyright infringement.
The battle was lost. The best way to act is to simply declare that some theft is bad, and some not that bad.
I think its quite a good strategy, e.g: The "Pirate Party". Instead of trying to fight the language changes, embrace them and proudly claim you are a pirate. In this case, I can proudly claim I am a thief, as I do not support copyright law and it is not enforced anyhow.
Microsoft basically took the BSD network code into Windows.
You claim this has not harmed BSD in any way, because they still have that code.
But this ignores the fact that if Microsoft had to develop their own network code instead of using BSD's code, they would have had less of an advantage in the OS market. This would almost certainly mean more BSD users (perhaps by a slight margin, but there are probably many more pieces of BSD'ish code in Windows), and less Windows users. More BSD users would bring more developers. By closing up a fork of BSD's code, Microsoft gained an unfair competitive advantage (BSD cannot take Microsoft's code) which took away resources from BSD.
As another poster mentioned, Microsoft used the BSD network code to sell more copies of Windows, that funded their work on Windows, and potentially on the BSD network code.
This funding may or may not prove an unfair advantage in their work on the network code derivative. By making a closed derivative to a BSD work far more attractive, it is de-facto "closing the code", as far as users are concerned. This is both because the practical advantages will for many require abandoning the older less-developed open version, and because it may become a de-facto standard or monopoly that forces users to use the code in its closed form.
So while the BSD writers may have had the best of intentions, their software users (Windows users) are not enjoying any of the freedoms that the BSD guys thought they were giving away.
So, if you are creating software with the purpose of reaching maximum popularity, or that the next "hop" (the next developers of it) can do what they want, BSD is for you.
If you want to develop software that is free, GPL is for you.
Need an example? If I create software under the GPL I cannot take any code under other open source licenses (MPL, BSD, Apache, etc.) and integrate it as part of my GPLed program. Why? Because the GPL requires that all parts of my software are released under the GPL! See?
Sure you can. The GPL applies to those who don't have the right to distribute the software in the first place. You have the copyright to your own work, so the GPL limitations only apply to whoever you, as the copyright holder, want them to apply, and not to yourself.
The other licenses allow me to combine open source code covered by different licenses in one single product. That's why they give us more freedom than the GPL.
As others said already, there is a trade-off between developer "freedom" (to lock users away from using the software [this is more of a "power" than a "freedom"], or to combine software in certain ways) and user freedom. BSD places more freedom and power in the hands of developers, which necessarily means less freedom to the software users.
Since there are probably far more users of software than developers, I'd say that the net freedom is actually larger with the GPL.
Its hard to explain the theory behind why Lisp code is unreadable, so a lot of rational people who like to believe only what they can prove theoretically have a dissonance about it. Nevertheless, many Lisp hackers prefer Python for their daily work:-)
"Yeah, Lisp is better, but I'm using Python for this and that":-)
Therefore the machine gun would save lives. Of course it did not work out that way.
It sure did work that way. It saved lives of soldiers on the side that had machine guns. Of course the other side had more casualties, that was the point of the machine gun.
Linus did, and that's why the OS is named after him.
Linus didn't. He wrote a kernel.
The free unix clone was a combination of Linux and GNU code and others. Sure, they could have written it, maybe. But they didn't. And GNU had a lot more LOCs/work put into it than the Linux kernel, especially years ago when the name debate started. So it would make sense to name the entire unix clone you compose according to the name of the largest/most significant contributor, doesn't it? In that case, GNU was definitely it, at least in those days.
The purpose of the GNU work is to make people aware of Freedom-related issues.
Saying Stallman insisting on calling it GNU is hubris is funny, when you consider that its not Stallman who named it after his first name.
Its reasonable to request distributions that are heavily based on Linux and GNU to mention GNU in their name.
I would also think it is reasonable for a huge codebase such as KDE to request that, too. For example, "Kubuntu" for short, and "A KDE frontend to a GNU/Linux system" for long.
Calling it "Kubuntu Linux" (or "Redhat Linux") despite that simple request is not "illegal" or even not legitimate, but it is not very considerate of the many people who contributed to GNU in the hopes of raising awareness to the GNU project and software Freedom.
than persecuting a larger group that simply has some overlap.
It seems that the type of overlap these days, is a superset. Virtually all terrorist threats are islamic, which means that there is no point doing security checks of anyone but muslims.
This is viewed as persecution, even though it is based on the fact that virtually all modern terrorists are muslim, and does not imply that all muslims are terrorists.
Leaks are logical bugs, not memory management bugs, so ofcourse GC does not eliminate them.
GC does eliminate a few classes of bugs:
A specific kind of memory leak: Of ceasing to hold references to an object, but not freeing it.
Pointer arithmetic and forging is impossible, so objects cannot override each others' memory. This kind of bug creates cryptic problems that are pretty hard to debug, as they are not easily contained in a single component.
In manually-managed languages, leaks can cause crashes, security problems and memory overruns, while GC converts this to an "object leak". Object leaks usually translate to a memory leak (hog problem) and only rarely cause very serious problems (as in your example of leaking/etc/passwd).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, how could Stallman forget about the freedom to get the government to enforce restrictions on your derivative works!
When does a restriction cross the line from being an inconvinience to actually preventing freedom?
If the government barricades your house so you can't leave, is that against your freedom of movement? Its not really disallowing you - you just can't.
How about if it just puts some very hard to cross obstacles? Perhaps a long fence that you can cross with great effort?
There is no real difference between practical difficulty/impossibility and lack of freedom.
If you license your code GPL, you are allowed to violate the GPL when distributing it - its your copyright. Thus, you are allowed to license part of your program GPL, and part of it BSD, and have part of it even completely closed! Its your copyright.
This is, by the way, how nvidia binary kernel drivers work. They are not GPL, but linked against GPL. They simply wrote a GPL adapter for the kernel interface (it links with the kernel so it has to be GPL) and distributed their own code under a closed license and linked it with their GPL'd adapter.
If Windows was worse - it would have had a harder time becoming a monopoly and using the funds it receives to destroy BSD (and other open competitors) as best they could.
Having no source means not having the freedom to modify, in practice.
Its an important freedom, not a convenience.
Hey, it already exists! Its called the
We don't need more API fragmentation, we need less!
Every new API that does the same thing just makes my tools less useful because there is another aspect of the system that they cannot access.
If you used Free Software, you would not have to beg
Yeah!
We should have a Slashdot article about the new query_database function in GenericProject 3.2!
Talk about code, baby!
I used to think the same, but you can check modern dictionaries. The word theft already includes copyright infringement.
The battle was lost. The best way to act is to simply declare that some theft is bad, and some not that bad.
I think its quite a good strategy, e.g: The "Pirate Party". Instead of trying to fight the language changes, embrace them and proudly claim you are a pirate. In this case, I can proudly claim I am a thief, as I do not support copyright law and it is not enforced anyhow.
Wow, its hard to believe how many people on Slashdot still think that there is a dissonance with the GPL.
Its been explained well at least 500 times in every such license discussion, but some people are dense enough to still not get it.
BSD->More freedom to software developers (few), less to users (many)
GPL->More freedom to software users (many), less to developers (few)
GPL generates more net freedom.
Its as simple as that.
Microsoft basically took the BSD network code into Windows.
You claim this has not harmed BSD in any way, because they still have that code.
But this ignores the fact that if Microsoft had to develop their own network code instead of using BSD's code, they would have had less of an advantage in the OS market. This would almost certainly mean more BSD users (perhaps by a slight margin, but there are probably many more pieces of BSD'ish code in Windows), and less Windows users. More BSD users would bring more developers. By closing up a fork of BSD's code, Microsoft gained an unfair competitive advantage (BSD cannot take Microsoft's code) which took away resources from BSD.
As another poster mentioned, Microsoft used the BSD network code to sell more copies of Windows, that funded their work on Windows, and potentially on the BSD network code.
This funding may or may not prove an unfair advantage in their work on the network code derivative. By making a closed derivative to a BSD work far more attractive, it is de-facto "closing the code", as far as users are concerned. This is both because the practical advantages will for many require abandoning the older less-developed open version, and because it may become a de-facto standard or monopoly that forces users to use the code in its closed form.
So while the BSD writers may have had the best of intentions, their software users (Windows users) are not enjoying any of the freedoms that the BSD guys thought they were giving away.
So, if you are creating software with the purpose of reaching maximum popularity, or that the next "hop" (the next developers of it) can do what they want, BSD is for you.
If you want to develop software that is free, GPL is for you.
How can you practice the freedom to modify a program without the source?
Sure you can. The GPL applies to those who don't have the right to distribute the software in the first place. You have the copyright to your own work, so the GPL limitations only apply to whoever you, as the copyright holder, want them to apply, and not to yourself.
As others said already, there is a trade-off between developer "freedom" (to lock users away from using the software [this is more of a "power" than a "freedom"], or to combine software in certain ways) and user freedom. BSD places more freedom and power in the hands of developers, which necessarily means less freedom to the software users.
Since there are probably far more users of software than developers, I'd say that the net freedom is actually larger with the GPL.
Lisp code is unreadable.
:-)
:-)
Its hard to explain the theory behind why Lisp code is unreadable, so a lot of rational people who like to believe only what they can prove theoretically have a dissonance about it. Nevertheless, many Lisp hackers prefer Python for their daily work
"Yeah, Lisp is better, but I'm using Python for this and that"
Here are my thoughts on Lisp: A critique of Lisp.
I read Mary was mistranslated from a "young lady" to a "virgin", and that is the source of that entire silliness.
If a woman is color-blind, all of her sons will also be color-blind.
Her daughters will only carry a defective gene, but unless the father is also color-blind, the daughters will not be color-blind.
It sure did work that way. It saved lives of soldiers on the side that had machine guns. Of course the other side had more casualties, that was the point of the machine gun.
And robots, too, will have the same effect.
Linus didn't. He wrote a kernel.
The free unix clone was a combination of Linux and GNU code and others. Sure, they could have written it, maybe. But they didn't.
And GNU had a lot more LOCs/work put into it than the Linux kernel, especially years ago when the name debate started. So it would make sense to name the entire unix clone you compose according to the name of the largest/most significant contributor, doesn't it? In that case, GNU was definitely it, at least in those days.
The purpose of the GNU work is to make people aware of Freedom-related issues.
Saying Stallman insisting on calling it GNU is hubris is funny, when you consider that its not Stallman who named it after his first name.
Its reasonable to request distributions that are heavily based on Linux and GNU to mention GNU in their name.
I would also think it is reasonable for a huge codebase such as KDE to request that, too. For example, "Kubuntu" for short, and "A KDE frontend to a GNU/Linux system" for long.
Calling it "Kubuntu Linux" (or "Redhat Linux") despite that simple request is not "illegal" or even not legitimate, but it is not very considerate of the many people who contributed to GNU in the hopes of raising awareness to the GNU project and software Freedom.
The wall was recently built to prevent repeated infiltrations done to blow up buses full of women and children.
It seems that the type of overlap these days, is a superset. Virtually all terrorist threats are islamic, which means that there is no point doing security checks of anyone but muslims.
This is viewed as persecution, even though it is based on the fact that virtually all modern terrorists are muslim, and does not imply that all muslims are terrorists.
Islamic terror exists because of Islam, and because it puts its leaders in power for as long as a conflict holds.
GC does eliminate a few classes of bugs:
I, for one, am glad that proprietary drivers are so poor, because it encourages free drivers to be written instead.
These are not only free-er, but usually of better quality too.
Its not easy to take modifications into a forked tree. Especially if the differences are significant.
They have to merge in every trivial piece of work.