But that only works if every existing author had the "or any later version" clause in their GPL notice. If they didn't, then some parts of the project are GPL 2.0 (or even 1.0) only. To throw a 3.0-only patch into that mix is to create a project that cannot be distributed under any one license.
We live in a world where truth is a stranger. Spin is king. "Seeing both sides of an issue" is dead, and "saying whatever will get people to do what you want" is running out of control, like Godzilla in Tokyo.
Hello, truth? Are you out there? Come back... we miss you.
If the data gets compromised in a central Microsoft server, Microsoft is the only one to blame. If the data gets compromised on your home PC, Microsoft will blame you for failing to secure it properly.
Sure - if the file is actually stored as UTF8. And, in fact, that's current recommended practice, because one OS doesn't necessarily encode the same as another, and so anything that you want to be portable between platforms you had better save as UTF8. In the same way, wire formats had better be UTF8, as well. (And, yes, UTF8 isn't the only possible encoding. It's the most universal, though, and if you want to produce something that everybody can read, it's your best bet.)
But that's the current situation. The original question was about 25 years down the road. Will everything (textual) be saved then as true Unicode, just as in the past everything was saved as ASCII? (For that to happen, one Unicode format would have to become the standard.)
And by the way, I've spent the last four months working on adding Unicode to a fairly large product, and have had to get it compiling on four different UNIX flavors, so I think I have at least some familiarity with how Unicode encodings work...
I guess I wasn't clear enough, so I'll try to me more clear.
Let's suppose you have a file that has the text "ABC" in it. Currently, the bytes in the file (in hex) are "41 42 43". But in a Unicode world, they should be "00 41 00 42 00 43" or even "00 00 00 41 00 00 00 42 00 00 00 43", depending on whether we wind up with 16-bit or 32-bit Unicode.
So the hypothetical Unicode text-file program in the future reads "41 42 43" and sees one and a half characters rather than 3, and the one complete character it sees does not correspond to any ASCII character.
... had better be readable in 25 years by the software that exists then. If for no other reason, because so much of UNIX is based on text files.
Now, the text files of 25 years from now may well not use 8-bit characters (think Unicode here). So current text files may in fact not be directly readable by the current software in 25 years (though I would bet that there will be some software in 25 years that still has an "import old 8-bit files" option, again on UNIX/Linux if nowhere else).
HTML will almost certainly still be readable. Doc format? Forget it.
Hmm, I think I see a pattern here. Open formats survive longer than closed ones.
The pointless turf battles aren't the problem. The real problem is the member states who, though they are completely totalitarian, are treated like they are just the same as all the other countries, and wind up in positions of authority on UN boards where they can poison other countries freedoms.
Insightful? When he doesn't know that CPUs do in fact have multiply instructions, with hardware (for example, funnel shifters) and microcode to implement them? Isn't that CPU hardware and microcode "the computer"?
No, it's a bit worse than that. If you're named after Alexis de Tocqueville, and you're in favor of "civil liberties, political equality, and economic freedom and opportunity", but you're against open source, you must be...
Misnamed. And lying about what you stand for.
It's more like someone who claims to be speaking for the Democrats talking about how the unions are damaging businesses...
You want to be picky? OK. Shouldn't you have a comma in there? Like, "Doesn't, you moron!"
Perhaps you would do better to be civil? Remember that some people post here who do not have English as their first language. (And their English is better than my Spanish or Lithuanian or Swahili, and probably better than yours, too.) So if you're going to correct them, it doesn't hurt to be kind and polite.
... and point out that your company is actually shipping code copyrighted by IBM, and not shipping it under the terms of the license that would give them the right to ship it.
Use SCO v. IBM to point out to your managers what it's like to be going against IBM in a courtroom when both the law and the facts are on IBM's side. Point out that IBM's IP lawyers are called the Nazgul for a reason. Point out that, once they have become aware of the issue, it becomes willful infringement.
First tell them in person. If they don't listen, then E-mail them a memo about it. This does two things. It helps cover your backside ("I tried to fix things, but my managers wouldn't listen!") and it creates a document trail for discovery when the lawsuit happens (this point will probably not escape your managers).
Not quite. You said, "pull out the new code". The new code is copyright by the authors, under whatever terms they want. But if they distribute the GPLed code, then they have to distribute the sources to the GPLed code, and their new changes as well, under the GPL (presuming the new changes are part of "one thing" with the GPLed code, with "one thing" being defined by the GPL).
But if I take some GPL code, use it as a base for my new code, eventually separate my new code from the GPL code, do I still have to GPL my code? No, not even if I distribute it, because there is no GPLed code in the distribution. It doesn't matter that I looked at the GPL code. It doesn't matter if I linked to GPLed code for a while. It only matters if I distribute GPLed code as part of my distribution.
Um, no, it's not as clear-cut as that. The Geneva Convention places some constraints on how you treat POWs: humanely, no torture, no killing them, etc. In return, it places some requirements on the other side: Among other things, they have to be identifiable combatants, with a distinguishing uniform.
Now, when this was written, it wasn't intended particularly to distinguish between soldiers and terrorists, but rather between soldiers and spies. If you were behind enemy lines out of uniform, and were caught, then heaven help you, because the Geneva Convention wasn't going to.
So, no, it's not a "stupid technicality". It's a very clear and deliberate distinction. You want to be treated like a POW? You have to play by the rules for soldiers. You don't want to play by those rules? You don't get those protections.
Now, is it fair to apply the same distinction to terrorists? I would say, yes, it is. If someone wants to attack my country by invading, in uniform, our army will fight back. If we capture him, he gets treated like a POW. If someone wants to try to blend into the population, and then suddenly kill a number of civilians, and we catch him before he is able to get to the killing part, sorry, no, he doesn't get the POW treatment.
Wrong. A phone call only requests an action in real time.
You can turn the ringer off. It's not illegal, immoral, or even fattening. You also can listen to it ring and still choose not to answer it (we sometimes do this during meals - and we should do it more).
Realizing that you don't have to answer the phone every time it rings can be very freeing...
Utah has some pluses. It's not the most tolerant place in the nation, in terms of morality, but with respect to race, it's pretty good (with the possible exception of blacks).
Why? Well, Utah has all these Mormon missionaries, and they go all over the world, and some of them meet a girl, and then a lot of them come back to Utah, and some of them bring back the girl that they met.
I work in an engineering lab with about 120 people. I know of a guy with a wife from Japan, one with a wife from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, one with a wife from the Caribbean. We also have several guys from China, one from Korea, a lady of Chinese descent from South America, a lady from Russia, a man from India, a Polynesian lady from Hawaii, a guy from Australia, and yours truly, a Utah native who is non-Mormon.
It's pretty homogenous in terms of world-view, but ethnically, it's more diverse and more tolerant than you would expect...
> > You can make a turtle fly at speeds breaking the sound barrier aswell.
> > Is the turtle designed for that?
> Yes.
Too many... sarcastic replies... can't choose...
This has to rank as one of the stupidest statements ever made. Dude, I don't know what things are like on your planet, but around here, turtles were not designed for any such thing. They were designed for swimming in a much thicker medium at much slower speeds.
In the same way, Windows was not designed for clustering. It wasn't even designed to be multi-user or Internet-enabled, and we've seen the security problems that have resulted from Microsoft kludging it to do what it was never designed to do. (And I'm sure you're going to say "Of course Windows 1.0 wasn't designed for that, but NT was!" But NT, while it was (at least supposed to be) a from-the-ground-up rewrite of Windows, it still kept enough of the original design to be seriously flawed with respect to multi-user (see the shatter attack) and the Internet (see the RPC issues, along with many others). Microsoft added to the capabilities, but never fixed the design.)
And, yes, you can make turtles fly supersonic. But the G-force from the JATO does bad things to their internal organs, and the duct tape chafes their hide. In the same way, Microsoft can make Windows cluster. But was it designed for it? Or was it just forced into the role, with a lot of duct tape and bandaids?
I think his point was that geeks find it way too easy to get all wrapped up in their work, and forget about time with their family, which is ultimately more important. It can matter to have a geek like Linus, that many of us deeply respect, also show that balance, that he has a life outside the kernel.
On their deathbed, nobody ever said, "I wish I had spent more time at the office..."
I can offer you the $5, but you don't have to take it. If you take it, then you can't sue me for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (More precisely, you can sue, but you will lose because of the $5.)
So the rule is: Always turn down the $5. Why? Well, it keeps your options open, and it's not like $5 is so much money...
Unfortunately, to win the court case, you not only have to not take the $5, you also have to render the EULA legally null and void...
Canopy (SCO's parent) was planning on finding the Czarist gold to fund their continued growth, but couldn't find it. So they hired Darl to head SCO and make them a bunch of money instead.
Unfortunately, back in the 60's, Darl actually found the Czarist gold. But the government wanted him to pay taxes on it, so he assassinated JFK. The UFOs decided that the Czarist gold was causing us a lot of trouble, and so in our own best interest, they took it. Unfortunately for SCO, at the same time the UFOs also stole Darl's brain, on the grounds that since he had assassinated JFK, he was too dangerous to leave unchecked. But this missing brain caused large problems for SCO down the road, when they tried to take on IBM...
(In case it isn't clear to one and all, there is no connection whatsoever between this post and reality.)
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But that only works if every existing author had the "or any later version" clause in their GPL notice. If they didn't, then some parts of the project are GPL 2.0 (or even 1.0) only. To throw a 3.0-only patch into that mix is to create a project that cannot be distributed under any one license.
We live in a world where truth is a stranger. Spin is king. "Seeing both sides of an issue" is dead, and "saying whatever will get people to do what you want" is running out of control, like Godzilla in Tokyo.
Hello, truth? Are you out there? Come back... we miss you.
If the data gets compromised in a central Microsoft server, Microsoft is the only one to blame. If the data gets compromised on your home PC, Microsoft will blame you for failing to secure it properly.
But that's the current situation. The original question was about 25 years down the road. Will everything (textual) be saved then as true Unicode, just as in the past everything was saved as ASCII? (For that to happen, one Unicode format would have to become the standard.)
And by the way, I've spent the last four months working on adding Unicode to a fairly large product, and have had to get it compiling on four different UNIX flavors, so I think I have at least some familiarity with how Unicode encodings work...
I guess I wasn't clear enough, so I'll try to me more clear.
Let's suppose you have a file that has the text "ABC" in it. Currently, the bytes in the file (in hex) are "41 42 43". But in a Unicode world, they should be "00 41 00 42 00 43" or even "00 00 00 41 00 00 00 42 00 00 00 43", depending on whether we wind up with 16-bit or 32-bit Unicode.
So the hypothetical Unicode text-file program in the future reads "41 42 43" and sees one and a half characters rather than 3, and the one complete character it sees does not correspond to any ASCII character.
... had better be readable in 25 years by the software that exists then. If for no other reason, because so much of UNIX is based on text files.
Now, the text files of 25 years from now may well not use 8-bit characters (think Unicode here). So current text files may in fact not be directly readable by the current software in 25 years (though I would bet that there will be some software in 25 years that still has an "import old 8-bit files" option, again on UNIX/Linux if nowhere else).
HTML will almost certainly still be readable. Doc format? Forget it.
Hmm, I think I see a pattern here. Open formats survive longer than closed ones.
&%^*^^&* right it's a politically sensitive issue! Let the UN try to regulate my freedom of speech, and they'll find out it's mighty sensitive!!!
***Cough***UN Human Rights Committee***Cough***
Funny, my search of the Internet shows none for sale...
Insightful? When he doesn't know that CPUs do in fact have multiply instructions, with hardware (for example, funnel shifters) and microcode to implement them? Isn't that CPU hardware and microcode "the computer"?
No, it's a bit worse than that. If you're named after Alexis de Tocqueville, and you're in favor of "civil liberties, political equality, and economic freedom and opportunity", but you're against open source, you must be...
Misnamed. And lying about what you stand for.
It's more like someone who claims to be speaking for the Democrats talking about how the unions are damaging businesses...
Well, group theory is a fairly abstract area of math, but it winds up being used in the error-correction codes on CDs.
Relations were just an obscure mathematical area until Codd came along.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples...
The courts ruled that you can't trademark numbers.
You want to be picky? OK. Shouldn't you have a comma in there? Like, "Doesn't, you moron!"
Perhaps you would do better to be civil? Remember that some people post here who do not have English as their first language. (And their English is better than my Spanish or Lithuanian or Swahili, and probably better than yours, too.) So if you're going to correct them, it doesn't hurt to be kind and polite.
Teach, don't mock.
Use SCO v. IBM to point out to your managers what it's like to be going against IBM in a courtroom when both the law and the facts are on IBM's side. Point out that IBM's IP lawyers are called the Nazgul for a reason. Point out that, once they have become aware of the issue, it becomes willful infringement.
First tell them in person. If they don't listen, then E-mail them a memo about it. This does two things. It helps cover your backside ("I tried to fix things, but my managers wouldn't listen!") and it creates a document trail for discovery when the lawsuit happens (this point will probably not escape your managers).
But if I take some GPL code, use it as a base for my new code, eventually separate my new code from the GPL code, do I still have to GPL my code? No, not even if I distribute it, because there is no GPLed code in the distribution. It doesn't matter that I looked at the GPL code. It doesn't matter if I linked to GPLed code for a while. It only matters if I distribute GPLed code as part of my distribution.
Now, when this was written, it wasn't intended particularly to distinguish between soldiers and terrorists, but rather between soldiers and spies. If you were behind enemy lines out of uniform, and were caught, then heaven help you, because the Geneva Convention wasn't going to.
So, no, it's not a "stupid technicality". It's a very clear and deliberate distinction. You want to be treated like a POW? You have to play by the rules for soldiers. You don't want to play by those rules? You don't get those protections.
Now, is it fair to apply the same distinction to terrorists? I would say, yes, it is. If someone wants to attack my country by invading, in uniform, our army will fight back. If we capture him, he gets treated like a POW. If someone wants to try to blend into the population, and then suddenly kill a number of civilians, and we catch him before he is able to get to the killing part, sorry, no, he doesn't get the POW treatment.
You can turn the ringer off. It's not illegal, immoral, or even fattening. You also can listen to it ring and still choose not to answer it (we sometimes do this during meals - and we should do it more).
Realizing that you don't have to answer the phone every time it rings can be very freeing...
Well, I would, see, but I kind of need Microsoft to release IE for Linux first...
Utah has some pluses. It's not the most tolerant place in the nation, in terms of morality, but with respect to race, it's pretty good (with the possible exception of blacks).
Why? Well, Utah has all these Mormon missionaries, and they go all over the world, and some of them meet a girl, and then a lot of them come back to Utah, and some of them bring back the girl that they met.
I work in an engineering lab with about 120 people. I know of a guy with a wife from Japan, one with a wife from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, one with a wife from the Caribbean. We also have several guys from China, one from Korea, a lady of Chinese descent from South America, a lady from Russia, a man from India, a Polynesian lady from Hawaii, a guy from Australia, and yours truly, a Utah native who is non-Mormon.
It's pretty homogenous in terms of world-view, but ethnically, it's more diverse and more tolerant than you would expect...
> > Is the turtle designed for that?
> Yes.
Too many... sarcastic replies... can't choose...
This has to rank as one of the stupidest statements ever made. Dude, I don't know what things are like on your planet, but around here, turtles were not designed for any such thing. They were designed for swimming in a much thicker medium at much slower speeds.
In the same way, Windows was not designed for clustering. It wasn't even designed to be multi-user or Internet-enabled, and we've seen the security problems that have resulted from Microsoft kludging it to do what it was never designed to do. (And I'm sure you're going to say "Of course Windows 1.0 wasn't designed for that, but NT was!" But NT, while it was (at least supposed to be) a from-the-ground-up rewrite of Windows, it still kept enough of the original design to be seriously flawed with respect to multi-user (see the shatter attack) and the Internet (see the RPC issues, along with many others). Microsoft added to the capabilities, but never fixed the design.)
And, yes, you can make turtles fly supersonic. But the G-force from the JATO does bad things to their internal organs, and the duct tape chafes their hide. In the same way, Microsoft can make Windows cluster. But was it designed for it? Or was it just forced into the role, with a lot of duct tape and bandaids?
I think his point was that geeks find it way too easy to get all wrapped up in their work, and forget about time with their family, which is ultimately more important. It can matter to have a geek like Linus, that many of us deeply respect, also show that balance, that he has a life outside the kernel.
On their deathbed, nobody ever said, "I wish I had spent more time at the office..."
So the rule is: Always turn down the $5. Why? Well, it keeps your options open, and it's not like $5 is so much money...
Unfortunately, to win the court case, you not only have to not take the $5, you also have to render the EULA legally null and void...
Can't resist a challenge ;-)
Canopy (SCO's parent) was planning on finding the Czarist gold to fund their continued growth, but couldn't find it. So they hired Darl to head SCO and make them a bunch of money instead.
Unfortunately, back in the 60's, Darl actually found the Czarist gold. But the government wanted him to pay taxes on it, so he assassinated JFK. The UFOs decided that the Czarist gold was causing us a lot of trouble, and so in our own best interest, they took it. Unfortunately for SCO, at the same time the UFOs also stole Darl's brain, on the grounds that since he had assassinated JFK, he was too dangerous to leave unchecked. But this missing brain caused large problems for SCO down the road, when they tried to take on IBM...
(In case it isn't clear to one and all, there is no connection whatsoever between this post and reality.)
It said, "Nothing to see here. Move along."