Both version 1 and version 2 have the identical "If the Program does not specify a version number of the license, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation" clause.
Accordingly, whether the court decides version 1 or 2 was implied by the programmer, by the text of either license, either license (and any future GPL) may be used if a version was not specifically stated.
There is an open Java language specification. I never denied it; I never even implied otherwise. I said not a word about specifications or standards. I talked solely about software.
The problem isn't that OO.o is dependent on the Java specification; it's that, because that specification has no Open Source implementation, OO.o is dependent on Sun's Java. And Java, the software product from Sun, is not Open Source and not Free Software.
I'm not saying.NET is freer than Java. I'm not saying Sun is doing anything wrong. I'm not saying the specification isn't open. I'm not saying Mono isn't going to get steamrollered by a lawsuit. I am pointing out the simple fact that Sun's Java is not Free Software, and is not Open Source software. Never has been.
Calling that FUD doesn't change it, no matter how much you yell it, and no matter how many scare quotes you scatter.
There was a lot of lobbying of TrollTech over its Qt license and of the KDE team over its Qt dependence, too - and then GNOME was launched. One would hope the OO.o team learned from history, rather than blindly go forward to see it repeat.
The Qt libraries were free, if not Free, and they made it easier to create an environment and apps that Just Worked. The result was a series of complaints, and when those failed, GNOME. TrollTech noticed that it was losing ground as distros favored Free Software over free software, and finally GPLed Qt.
If OO.o becomes harder and harder to run on GCJ, you're going to see the same thing. Maybe an OO.o fork, maybe a specific effort to create a different Free competitor. But dependence on a non-Free system component is going to create trouble; if OO.o wants to thrive in the long run, it's going to either need to be GCJ-compatible or have Sun open-source Java.
Easier to carry one in your pocket than multiple tools; if you're not at home and you run into a need for a Phillips-head screwdriver, a Swiss Army knife is somewhat better than nothing.
It would make sense, from a technical point of view, for AFP to tell its customers to mark AFP content as not for Google to use.
From a buisness point of view, it makes more sense to try to extract money from Google than to tell your customers to do something that would cost them money. AFP is probably looking for a deal where Google doesn't change its behavior, but merely pays AFP a flat licensing fee for any AFP content that may show up on Google News.
Google wants to avoid that, because it would open the floodgates to anybody who licenses content to newspapers to demand a Google cut. So AFP is suing to try to push Google into accepting the deal.
Because they can't; AFP doesn't own (all) the servers Google is taking AFP content from.
AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews. The result is that AFP content licensed by newspapers winds up on Google News, even though AFP did not allow Google direct access to AFP content.
Soybean biodiesel is not an achievable solution to anything. The amount of soybean oil produced per acre is low enough that a conversion of all the arable land on Earth to soybean growing, at American crop yields, wouldn't produce enough biodiesel to replace current diesel usage. Throw in the increase in diesel usage that would accompany a spread of U.S. mechanized farming worldwide, plus the troubles with fertilizer and pesticides, the disruption of food agriculture, and . . . well, it just can't scale.
Now, rapeseed, that's at least marginally plausible, with its much higher oil content. But if biodiesel actually has a future, it's probably in the algae pond, grown on non-arable land and irrigated with salt water. The world has lots of unused non-arable land, and incredible amounts of salt water.
"Lately, Slashdot quality has been going down the tubes." Moderated insightful.
I'd say moderation quality has lately been going down the tubes, but my defintion of "lately" would be "since the expansion past 400-odd moderators" . . .
Sprint was formed in the 1970s by the Southern Pacific, as Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Telecommunications. It was sold to GTE in 1983 and remained its own unit; began creation of its fiber-optic long distance network in 1984, then was sold by GTE to United Telecommunications in 1986. UT renamed itself Sprint in 1992.
Given its very, very brief history as a distinct GTE unit, I elided over that by treating it as a separate company.
Four RBOCs left, actually. BellSouth, SBC, Verizon, and Qwest.
Perhaps the most logical combo left is Qwest, BellSouth, and Sprint. That would have local coverage in the West and Southeast, with long distance and nationwide cell coverage; it would also be a lot more acceptable to regulators than a purchase of any of the components by SBC or Verizon.
With the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the telephone market largely looked like the following:
Long Distance: AT&T MCI Sprint Qwest
Local Telephone: Nynex (Baby Bell) Bell Atlantic (Baby Bell) BellSouth (Baby Bell) Ameritech (Baby Bell) Southwestern Bell (Baby Bell) U.S. West (Baby Bell) Pacbell (Baby Bell) GTE (independent local carrier)
I mean, there were other minor players, but those were the biggies.
Today, if the announced mergers go through, these players are now parts of:
SBC (AT&T, Southwestern Bell, Pacbell, and Ameritech) Verizon (Nynex, Bell Atlantic, GTE, and MCI) Qwest (Qwest, U.S. West) Sprint (Sprint) BellSouth (BellSouth)
Bruce Tognazzini, founder the Apple Human Interface Group and fomer Apple Human Interface Evangelist, disagrees.
Some might be surprised to learn, however, that not only do I accept the idea of having flashing updates, such as "loading the kernel," I actually embrace it. First, it keeps the user engaged, and an engaged user is a happy user. Second, it informs. Yes, I'm aware that the only kernel most people are aware off is armed with eleven herbs and spices, but that's because no one has ever introduced them to the UNIX/LINUX kernel.
In ancient times, before there was disk, we all used tape cassettes to store our applications. We could literally hear them as they loaded into the computer over a period of one to three minutes. (Thank heavens today's hard disks are a million times faster so that, for example, Excel can load in only a few microseconds.) One might assume the sound of a loading program would be indistinguishable from random noise, but that proved not the case. Every application and every image had a unique signature. After a while, we could tell if we'd started the wrong program just by the sound of its code.
Today, few modem users understand handshaking protocols, but they do become used to a familiar pattern of clicks and screeches indicating normal vs. abnormal connections.
If regular folk can come to "understand" on some level the sound of high-speed binary code, do you think they cannot absorb some lessons from being subjected to new terminology like "kernel," etc.? Such terms so often come to be useful, as when some system software programmer spits out some horrifying message like, "fatal execution of kernel." At least they won't fear their supply of fried chicken is about to be cut off.
Entertain them. Teach them a little something, even if it seems "way over their heads." At the very least, it will keep them awake and alert.
You clearly have never been the subject of the traditional rants of the written science fiction community about how they do not write "sci-fi" or "skiffy", which is the domain of bad '50s monster movies. They write "science fiction" or "speculative fiction", which is SF if you must shorten the term.
With the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the telephone market largely looked like the following:
Long Distance: AT&T MCI Sprint Qwest
Local Telephone: Nynex (Baby Bell) Bell Atlantic (Baby Bell) BellSouth (Baby Bell) Ameritech (Baby Bell) Southwestern Bell (Baby Bell) U.S. West (Baby Bell) Pacbell (Baby Bell) GTE (independent local carrier)
I mean, there were other minor players, but those were the biggies.
Today, if this merger goes through, these players are now parts of:
SBC (AT&T, Southwestern Bell, Pacbell, and Ameritech) Verizon (Nynex, Bell Atlantic, and GTE) Qwest (Qwest, U.S. West) WorldCom (MCI) Sprint (Sprint) BellSouth (BellSouth)
First, the cursor keys move the cursor. Ever deal with a large text document where you needed to check back somewhere? The world is not just the Web.
Second there's a reason you use the scroll wheel on your IntelliMouse, after all. It's not because you can't work without one, its because it's a better human-computer interface. Since the Mac's claim to fame is HCI, it's a glaring omission from the default shipping Mac. And none of the one-button defenses apply.
(Oh, and why left of the keyboard instead of right? Because, for most of the population [righties], the two places to put the scroller so it's "to hand" are the mouse itself, or the left of the keyboard. On the right of the keyboard, most of the population is going to be moving its hand back-and-forth from the mouse to scroll. Not a fatal problem, but having it on the left is marginally superior. On the mouse, of course, works for both handednesses.)
Nine years after Microsoft invented it, there's no justification for Mac mice to not have a scroll wheel (or capacitve strip, or IBM trackstick scroller, or rocker switch, any of the other alternative scroll devices that have been tried since 1996) on either mouse or the left side of the keyboard.
The on-side-of-window click-and-move scroller is a vastly inferior interface. It's simply inexcusable for Macs to have a crippled scrolling interface by default. Make a mouse with an unclickable scroll wheel and only one button, if one button is better -- but drop the Not Invented Here blinders and admit that Microsoft actually had a good idea.
One button is defensible, but a mouse without a scroll wheel (even an unclickable one) in 2005 is inexcusable.
The scroll wheel is the greatest advance in human-computer input devices since the mouse itself; that Apple is still shipping mice without scroll wheels with Macs by default nine years after Microsoft's Intellimouse shows that NIH trumps HCI at Apple.
So why not just start ignoring it whenever it gets inconvenient?
Because when your economic growth is structurally dependent on export revenues, you don't want to give the governments of your markets an engraved invitation to shut down trade. And since respecting patents is a GATT/WTO obligation, ignoring them would be such an act.
China exports most to the US and Japan. The patents it would be ignoring would be mostly US and Japanese patents. US and Japanese corporations would be really, really ticked off, and they have political influence. How long do you think those exports would continue?
Slashdot Mirror
Both version 1 and version 2 have the identical "If the Program does not specify a version number of the license, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation" clause.
Accordingly, whether the court decides version 1 or 2 was implied by the programmer, by the text of either license, either license (and any future GPL) may be used if a version was not specifically stated.
There is an open Java language specification. I never denied it; I never even implied otherwise. I said not a word about specifications or standards. I talked solely about software.
.NET is freer than Java. I'm not saying Sun is doing anything wrong. I'm not saying the specification isn't open. I'm not saying Mono isn't going to get steamrollered by a lawsuit. I am pointing out the simple fact that Sun's Java is not Free Software, and is not Open Source software. Never has been.
The problem isn't that OO.o is dependent on the Java specification; it's that, because that specification has no Open Source implementation, OO.o is dependent on Sun's Java. And Java, the software product from Sun, is not Open Source and not Free Software.
I'm not saying
Calling that FUD doesn't change it, no matter how much you yell it, and no matter how many scare quotes you scatter.
There was a lot of lobbying of TrollTech over its Qt license and of the KDE team over its Qt dependence, too - and then GNOME was launched. One would hope the OO.o team learned from history, rather than blindly go forward to see it repeat.
Qt was free but not Open Source, too. That was a sufficient problem that the GNOME project was launched in response.
The Qt libraries were free, if not Free, and they made it easier to create an environment and apps that Just Worked. The result was a series of complaints, and when those failed, GNOME. TrollTech noticed that it was losing ground as distros favored Free Software over free software, and finally GPLed Qt.
If OO.o becomes harder and harder to run on GCJ, you're going to see the same thing. Maybe an OO.o fork, maybe a specific effort to create a different Free competitor. But dependence on a non-Free system component is going to create trouble; if OO.o wants to thrive in the long run, it's going to either need to be GCJ-compatible or have Sun open-source Java.
Sun's Java is neither Open Source nor Free Software. That's not MS FUD, that's merely a statement of the facts.
Easier to carry one in your pocket than multiple tools; if you're not at home and you run into a need for a Phillips-head screwdriver, a Swiss Army knife is somewhat better than nothing.
It would make sense, from a technical point of view, for AFP to tell its customers to mark AFP content as not for Google to use.
From a buisness point of view, it makes more sense to try to extract money from Google than to tell your customers to do something that would cost them money. AFP is probably looking for a deal where Google doesn't change its behavior, but merely pays AFP a flat licensing fee for any AFP content that may show up on Google News.
Google wants to avoid that, because it would open the floodgates to anybody who licenses content to newspapers to demand a Google cut. So AFP is suing to try to push Google into accepting the deal.
Because they can't; AFP doesn't own (all) the servers Google is taking AFP content from.
AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews. The result is that AFP content licensed by newspapers winds up on Google News, even though AFP did not allow Google direct access to AFP content.
"At Google Insurance, we don't just give you our price, we include quotes from our leading 15,371 competitors."
but considering 50% of them are dead
75%. You forgot that Paul is dead.
Soybean biodiesel is not an achievable solution to anything. The amount of soybean oil produced per acre is low enough that a conversion of all the arable land on Earth to soybean growing, at American crop yields, wouldn't produce enough biodiesel to replace current diesel usage. Throw in the increase in diesel usage that would accompany a spread of U.S. mechanized farming worldwide, plus the troubles with fertilizer and pesticides, the disruption of food agriculture, and . . . well, it just can't scale.
Now, rapeseed, that's at least marginally plausible, with its much higher oil content. But if biodiesel actually has a future, it's probably in the algae pond, grown on non-arable land and irrigated with salt water. The world has lots of unused non-arable land, and incredible amounts of salt water.
Snort.
"Lately, Slashdot quality has been going down the tubes." Moderated insightful.
I'd say moderation quality has lately been going down the tubes, but my defintion of "lately" would be "since the expansion past 400-odd moderators" . . .
More precisely:
Sprint was formed in the 1970s by the Southern Pacific, as Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Telecommunications. It was sold to GTE in 1983 and remained its own unit; began creation of its fiber-optic long distance network in 1984, then was sold by GTE to United Telecommunications in 1986. UT renamed itself Sprint in 1992.
Given its very, very brief history as a distinct GTE unit, I elided over that by treating it as a separate company.
Four RBOCs left, actually. BellSouth, SBC, Verizon, and Qwest.
Perhaps the most logical combo left is Qwest, BellSouth, and Sprint. That would have local coverage in the West and Southeast, with long distance and nationwide cell coverage; it would also be a lot more acceptable to regulators than a purchase of any of the components by SBC or Verizon.
With the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the telephone market largely looked like the following:
Long Distance:
AT&T
MCI
Sprint
Qwest
Local Telephone:
Nynex (Baby Bell)
Bell Atlantic (Baby Bell)
BellSouth (Baby Bell)
Ameritech (Baby Bell)
Southwestern Bell (Baby Bell)
U.S. West (Baby Bell)
Pacbell (Baby Bell)
GTE (independent local carrier)
I mean, there were other minor players, but those were the biggies.
Today, if the announced mergers go through, these players are now parts of:
SBC (AT&T, Southwestern Bell, Pacbell, and Ameritech)
Verizon (Nynex, Bell Atlantic, GTE, and MCI)
Qwest (Qwest, U.S. West)
Sprint (Sprint)
BellSouth (BellSouth)
You clearly have never been the subject of the traditional rants of the written science fiction community about how they do not write "sci-fi" or "skiffy", which is the domain of bad '50s monster movies. They write "science fiction" or "speculative fiction", which is SF if you must shorten the term.
To understand, think "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux".
With the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the telephone market largely looked like the following:
Long Distance:
AT&T
MCI
Sprint
Qwest
Local Telephone:
Nynex (Baby Bell)
Bell Atlantic (Baby Bell)
BellSouth (Baby Bell)
Ameritech (Baby Bell)
Southwestern Bell (Baby Bell)
U.S. West (Baby Bell)
Pacbell (Baby Bell)
GTE (independent local carrier)
I mean, there were other minor players, but those were the biggies.
Today, if this merger goes through, these players are now parts of:
SBC (AT&T, Southwestern Bell, Pacbell, and Ameritech)
Verizon (Nynex, Bell Atlantic, and GTE)
Qwest (Qwest, U.S. West)
WorldCom (MCI)
Sprint (Sprint)
BellSouth (BellSouth)
This comment body intentionally left blank.
First, the cursor keys move the cursor. Ever deal with a large text document where you needed to check back somewhere? The world is not just the Web.
Second there's a reason you use the scroll wheel on your IntelliMouse, after all. It's not because you can't work without one, its because it's a better human-computer interface. Since the Mac's claim to fame is HCI, it's a glaring omission from the default shipping Mac. And none of the one-button defenses apply.
(Oh, and why left of the keyboard instead of right? Because, for most of the population [righties], the two places to put the scroller so it's "to hand" are the mouse itself, or the left of the keyboard. On the right of the keyboard, most of the population is going to be moving its hand back-and-forth from the mouse to scroll. Not a fatal problem, but having it on the left is marginally superior. On the mouse, of course, works for both handednesses.)
Nine years after Microsoft invented it, there's no justification for Mac mice to not have a scroll wheel (or capacitve strip, or IBM trackstick scroller, or rocker switch, any of the other alternative scroll devices that have been tried since 1996) on either mouse or the left side of the keyboard.
The on-side-of-window click-and-move scroller is a vastly inferior interface. It's simply inexcusable for Macs to have a crippled scrolling interface by default. Make a mouse with an unclickable scroll wheel and only one button, if one button is better -- but drop the Not Invented Here blinders and admit that Microsoft actually had a good idea.
Nah, be cunning, call it "Lingool"
One button is defensible, but a mouse without a scroll wheel (even an unclickable one) in 2005 is inexcusable.
The scroll wheel is the greatest advance in human-computer input devices since the mouse itself; that Apple is still shipping mice without scroll wheels with Macs by default nine years after Microsoft's Intellimouse shows that NIH trumps HCI at Apple.
So why not just start ignoring it whenever it gets inconvenient?
Because when your economic growth is structurally dependent on export revenues, you don't want to give the governments of your markets an engraved invitation to shut down trade. And since respecting patents is a GATT/WTO obligation, ignoring them would be such an act.
China exports most to the US and Japan. The patents it would be ignoring would be mostly US and Japanese patents. US and Japanese corporations would be really, really ticked off, and they have political influence. How long do you think those exports would continue?