You are right, and I agree with everything you just said. However, the whole reason this was brought up was because someone started by saying that the RMS must think he write linux since he insists on calling it GNU/Linux. I was defending RMS to begin with, in that he has reasons for calling it that. However, I don't always call it that (neither do most), and the impression that seems to be prevelant (although I assume it's false) is that RMS attacks anyone who doesn't call it GNU/Linux and only does so out of jelousy and spite.
It's quite right that RMS is in the habit of correcting anyone who says Linux instead of GNU/Linux as a kind of knee-jerk response, particularly journalists. However I think (as do you, it seems) that simply ascribing this fact to jealously and spite is rather mean. I think it's much more likely that he thinks (as do I) that GNU/Linux is much more correct, and moreover that the distinction (particularly when the lay of the land is described to random journalists) is important. RMS in general serves as the community's collective conscience; always reminding everyone of the core values that free software; is founded on. I suspect that if everyone forgot about the whole GNU/Linux vs Linux thing and forgot him tomorrow but switched to free software only, he would die a happy man.
Wow. He agrees with the Unabomber: Advanced technology offers a threat to the human species.
What's the big deal? The existence of things such as nuclear bombs and biological weapons would not at all be possible without advanced technology. As such, advanced technology is certainly a threat to the human species (and the rest of the planet as well).
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not some sort of luddite. I don't think we're all going to kill ourselves tomorrow. I happen to be a bit more optimisitic than that, and I think that we'll avoid any planet-devastating mishaps in the forseeable future. But that doesn't mean that the dangers do not exist.
While, yes, it is bundled with gnu tools, I cannot think of any that couldn't be replaced (with non gnu free software at that). The GNU tools are not essential to Linux any more than a particular window manager is essential to X.
Whether it is theoretically feasible to replace bits of the GNU system with others does not have anything to do with whether or not it is the GNU system. For example, it might be possible to adapt some BSD libc to work with Linux, or to write a new one for scratch. But why bother when there is GNU libc already? Similarly for GNU fileutils, gcc, binutils and many more that I have probably forgotten.
I think it is rather telling of the differences in philosophy between the GNU folks and various others that RMS & Co. started out by creating the basic tools that you needed in order to be even able to create an operating system, such as a text editor and a compiler toolchain. These are tools that practically everybody in the free software movement uses, even those that otherwise have no relation to the GNU project at all.
Seriously, this license is intended mainly for software documentation, not novels. If you're writing software manuals and you can't get your head around LaTeX, texinfo or simple HTML then you have no business being a technical writer. LaTeX is very straight forward, I managed to typeset my first document with complicated mathematical symbols (I'm a maths student) within less than an hour.
Microsoft Word format is certainly proprietary, and if you don't know how much of a PITA it is to print, much less change, a reasonably complicated MSW document on a free os then you haven't tried. As RTF, I'm not at all that certain if it is proprietary in any real sense of the word, if the specification is publically available, but I'm no expert so I wouldn't pretend to give an authoritative answer.
There have been several good follow-ups to this already, but there is one point I would like to make:
2. Private use. Some guy wants to take a whole GDL document, modify it with his comments and give it to the 115 people in his lecture class. Does he also have to give them floppies since the distribution is > 100?
This is not private use by any stretch of the imagination. If you want to hand out copies on that scale, you'll have to hand out transparent ones as well.
Listen to this: "So I think that unauthorized copies are not much better than authorized copies. The only good thing about the unauthorized copy is that you avoid giving money to the owner. This is good, because the owner does not deserve a reward for making software proprietary."
Not true. He's saying that illegal software copying, while not immoral, is not a good idea in general (since you can't easily modify it and learn from it etc.) and that it is better to create free software instead.
Only once (Little Gaute lives there), and only for a weekend. My hosts joked about the city being so small that there was only one underground line. Maybe it's been extended since, or maybe I'm just misremembering.
Lovely place, though. Very nice, green feel to it; even close to the centre. I'd love to live there.
Obviously you don't know what the hell you are talking about. I count at least four:
1. Young
2. University
3. Bloor
4. Scarborough RT (Okay, not an underground, but you get the idea.)
Also note that these are some pretty long fscking lines, some of which are being extended. Oh yeah, don't forget commuter rail, that is only slightly substantial too. Damn, we can't forget rail cars, I can't even remember how many of lines of those there are. Then there are buses. . .
I'd go as far to say the TTC is one of the best public transit systems in the world. And I don't even live in Toronto.
Next time please know what you are talking about.
Oh, come on; ligthen up. At least I didn't claim to be an expert on urban structure the way some people on/. chat about OS kernels.
Dead or Alive, Mr. de Joot certainly is in the right here. The openssh.org site is not in anyway harming openssh. They're even providing the courtesy of linking to the projects site. OpenSSH should be happy that they're getting that much. They should have registered all of the TLD's, but didn't see it as being necessary, and apparently, they thought the.com was the one they needed the most.
Even the U.S. government has not been able to get around this mistake. There's the infamous whitehouse.com site, which is still active.
If someone came to me and said that I had to give them one of my domains, because they felt they had some right to it I'd laugh in their face. Simply because you're an open source project does not excuse stupidity.
Beyond all this, we're talking about the former Replay.com site here, now zedz.net which has provided for years a good many of us with free crypto systems. They were doing a service years before OpenSSH was even thought of.
I don't use OpenSSH on my machines yet, and I was considering switching, but due to this situation where it appears they're in the running for a Slashdot beanie for "Open source domain bully" I'm going to boycott the product, until they play nice.
Quite right. Personally, I think that this is probably, though I wouldn't know for sure, a result of Theo de Raadt's fairly well-know attitude problem. (Do a deja search on "Theo de Raadt" and RMS some time, or "Theo de Raadt, NetBSD and Core")
Did it ever occur to you that if things are breaking up all over the place, then the problem might be your computer, rather than the software? When I started clisp for the first time, I got an immediate segfault. I then went off and filed an important bug in the Debian bug tracking system. However, upon reboot it turned out that lots of files from all over my harddrive had gotten themselves corrupted. After fixing the errors and reinstalling clisp, it worked just fine. I still get lost clusters every time I fsck my harddrive, though--but this is most likely due to my computer being a pile of cheap crap.
Yes. 8-( Luckily, it seems to be up at 1 again. 8-) I don't think this is a problem in general, except if you post as 'Anonymous Coward', in which case you will quickly disappear from public view (read: go sub-zero) and thus never really get the chance to be moderated up again. If you're logged on, most people will still see you at 0. Personally, if I see a post which has clearly been unfairly moderated, I will often mark it 'Underrated' or 'Overrated' as appropriate, even if I would not have considered moderating it otherwise.
Incidentally, this is a good reason to set the limit to -1 if you've got moderator points. (I know you're encouraged to do so, but I somehow suspect that not enough people do.)
It's truly sad when an honest opinion - even if it is an opposing one - is adorned with the label of `troll'.
I'll be moderated down for this, as are all views which don't seem to match the general consensus.
No you won't, and no they're not.
But a great majority of patents are not filed for enforcement. Generally, patents are filed to prevent a competitor from doing it first. If you believe that companies who patent are evil, you're being naive. It's part of modern business, just like the endless lawsuits, and other related nonsense, but you can live, in disbelief, and post to Slashdot comments about how Amazon is patenting air, or whatever else, but perhaps you need to run a company that competes globally and see that it is probably the only safe way to protect yourself.
If you don't patent it first, someone else will, and sue you into oblivion.
This would be a good point, were it not for the fact that Amazon has by now got a history of using patents offensively. In fact, the Boycott Amazon page goes some way to acknowledge this:
Foolish government policies gave Amazon the opportunity--but an opportunity is not an excuse. Amazon made the choice to obtain this patent, and the choice to use it in court for aggression. The ultimate moral responsibility for Amazon's actions lies with Amazon's executives.
Realistically, would anyone have complained if Amazon had not started trying to enfore their patent? Off course not. This is even is spite of the fact that even the pontential of a lawsuit can and often does have a devastating inhibiting effect to a business.
Don't worry. Be happy. While this might seem like just another ridiculous patent to me and you, it is more significant than that.
Anyone with a certain minimum of knowledge about how computers and / or the internet works knows exactly how preposterous the one-click patent is. This patent is no different in that respect. The difference is that this patent is so much more blindingly obvious that anyone should be able to see why, with minimal rethoric required. This ought to make it a lot easier to fight the patent in court, and let's hope that Amazon's competitors do just that.
The state of the US Patent Office has been long lamented, in places such as the GNU website and the League for Programming Freedom. I personally believe that although some of the examples cited there, such as the use of XOR to highlit information on a bitmapped screen in an easily reverisble way, are, believe it or not, not sufficently obvious to the population at large that the average man and woman can be easily convinced.
Off course, being non-obvious to the average person is a subset of the legal requirements to obtain a patent--theoretically, a new patent may not be obvious, even if only to experts in the field. However, it has been obvious for a long time that the US Patent Office is blindingly incompetent in this regard. Maybe this time, we will have our day in court, and win it too.
Until then, I suggest that we all chip in and make a link to the Boycot Amazon page. Have you emailed Amazon to tell them what you think yet? I have.
The last time I checked, the Borland compiler was more or less commercially dead. Doesn't everybody use VC++ on Windows these days? I don't do Windows myself, so I wouldn't know.
Off course, this doesn't mean that one should hate Borland / Inprise / whatever any more or less than other non-free software companies, just that Borland has not given away something of great commercial value. Personally, I think it is just another attempt to resurrect a dead product using the market hoopla associated with Open Source. However, unlike Netscape, Borland is not doing this by actually making their product free software, but rather by diffusely associating themselves with Open Source. If BCC achieves any sort of popularity, there will be a for-charge, non-free "professional" edition out fairly quickly.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation ofpatent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patentissues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order,agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of thisLicense, they do not excuse you from the conditions of thisLicense.
The crucial point here is that the guy behind RTLinux would requireyou to note whether or not your real-time-os-under-linux is RTLinuxcompatible, and a whole slew of other things. However these areadditional requirements to the GPL, which are in general not allowed.Therefore, we would not be allowed to distribue RTLinux.
Or am I wrong? IANAL, are there any license-heads out there whowould care to comment? Anyone asked RMS or the FSF about this yet?
Sigh. I don't believe it. This has got to be one of the most blatant and ridiculous trolls that I have seen in a long time. Puting aside for a moment the GNU/linux issue, the GNU folks have always put great emphasis on documentation. This is why there is a ~500 page manual for emacs, which, incidentally, is entirely free for everyone. If you want a hardcopy, you can buy one from the FSF, or you can print the portions that you would like yourself. Similarly for glibc,gcc and so on. And by the way, when I said free, I meant free as in free speech. If you, I or anyone else should decide to make changes to emacs or gcc etc. then we would be entirely free to make changes to the manual to reflect them. Without condemning the LDP, I think that the clause in their license that requires everyone who wants to create a derivate work to get permission from the original author is a very bad idea. It is one reason why any documentation that I ever write will not be contributed to the LDP, and it is one reason that I suspect that RMS would not consider LDP docs part of the GNU system - the FSF has always held that the manual is one of the most important parts of the program, and that you should be as free to change it as you are to change the rest of the program.
Aside from the fact there is not even a glimmer of indication that RMS and the FSF will try or indeed wish to assume the honour for the work of the LDP, there is also the fact that the FSF has spent substantial resources on manuals and documentation. Take, for instance, RMS' offer of some time ago to pay a goodly-sized amount of cash for a good, free manual for GTK/GNOME programming.
Slashdot is great news site, but (IMO) it's forums are a bad usenet wannabe. I can choose my newsreader. I can even write my own (or find someone else to do it) if I can't find one I like. I can tailor a newsreader to my likes and set up the most complex filtering criteria. If slashdot breaks, no discussion. If one usenet server breaks, the rest of the world can continue. How about turning the slashdot discussion board programs into a news reader pointing at one particular thread in an appropiate newsgroup? (I'll help!) Bill, likes usenet, lots.
Have you tired Gnus with nnslashdot? Gnus is the premier newsreader for GNU emacsen, and has a nnslashdot backend which will download a discussion for you and then allow you to read it more or less as though it were a newsgroup, with all the usual goodies, such as scorefiles etc. Thanks to w3 (the webbrowser for emacsen) it will also grok the HTML tags that slashdot uses. As far as I know, the only thing that you can't do that you wouldn't want to use the web for anyway is spending moderation points. It's great, and I use it all the time, though not right now. 8-(
"...whether or not the restrictions of the QPL are sufficient to make it proprietary..."
The issue is not whether the QPL is proprietary or not. It is certainly *not* proprietary. The issue is whether it is "compatible" with the GPL. Many point to Section 6, which talks about extra restrictions. Although the QPL has fewer restrictions than the GPL, a couple of them are *different* from the GPL, and are thus additional.
You know, I am really not interested in discussing QT or the QPL. I am not a Debian developer, though I use debian on my machine. QT is most certainly free software. Although the word "proprietary" is not defined in the GPL, it is most often used to describe that which has restrictions additional to those of the GPL when the GPL is discussed. I'm sorry if there has been any misunderstanding.
What I would like to discuss is whether or not this case we're seeing here is a GPL misapplication (and notice that I do say misapplication rather than violation here) since this program is apparently built on top of a proprietary library. That would constitute creating a derived work which has restrictions additional to the GPL, which is the same sin that the KDE folks are accused of. Personally, I will withdraw judgement in the case of KDE.
Other issues that relate to this are: whether Qt is a module in KDE; whether dynamic linking to non-GPL libraries is or is not allowed; and whether the GPL is binding on third parties. Although the answers to these issues may seem obvious to you, there is by no means a unanimous agreement on them.
In order: QT is as far as I know not a module in KDE, although that is where it is most often used, and despite the fact that it is very vital to KDE.
I don't believe that dynamic linking or static linking makes a difference. "Creating a derived work", which is what the GPL (and copyright law in general) talks about is much more subtle than inclusion in a binary.
As for the GPL being binding on third parties, I am not sure what you mean. Anyone is free to use GPLed software however they see fit. The GPL covers redistribution of GPLed software. Since a priori one does not have a right to distribute software that one does not have copyright on without a license agreement, the only way in which one may distribute GPLed software is by accepting the conditions of the GPL. That is the cornerstone on which the GPL rests.
"...may not be linked with GPLed code in this fashion (unless you're the copyright holder, of course)..."
But KDE *is* the copyright holder for KDE:-) Again, that's not the problem. Debian can but won't distribute KDE because they are of the opinion that they do not have permission from KDE to do so.
Absolutely. The KDE folks can do whatever they want to code that they have written. What Debian can or cannot do to KDE depends on the license agreement. Their opinion as to how far that license goes seems to be different from yours. Debian can only do what the license says. The KDE folks have certainly given informal permission to copy and distribute KDE many times. If KDE was to make this formal by adding "... in addition, you may link this program to the QT library." to their license, Debian would distribute KDE tomorrow - or so I am given to understand. Once again, I am not a Debian developer. As far as I can see, the only thing that KDE would loose by doing so would be the ability to adopt pre-existing GPLed software to work with KDE. (Of course, according to Debian they do not really have that ability to begin with, but this would pretty much constitute an admission.) However, this is one thing that the KDE folks should be wary of already, since there are people out there who do not agree with their reading of the GPL. On the other hand, if they did include the above clause in their license, they would be much more likely to be met with goodwill by free software authors who actually care about these things.
I don't think that anyone really cares about the core of KDE since the KDE folks are certainly happy to let people distribute KDE. A more interesting question is GPLed code that has been adapted to work with KDE, such as kghostview.
Of coure, KDE may have used some GPL code within its own GPL code, and some are claiming that this is illegal on the face of it, and are seeking an injunction against every distribution that contains KDE.
I am not aware of anyone having resorted to legal steps against KDE. If that happened, it would be interesting news indeed...
If code written by someone whose reading of the GPL coincides with Debian's (and the authors of the GPL) was adapted to work with KDE/QT, it would be very interesting to see what happened. Of course, no-one really wants to find out. This is why there will never be a kemacs under current conditions: everyone knows that this would almost certainly start world war three. 8-(
"In this case, what we're talking about is almost certainly not the QPL."
No, it's not. The announcement said "proprietary" and the QPL is 100% Free Software. But the same situation applies with Debian. Even though the authors of Beam-it have a written document saying that everyone and their grandmother can freely redistribute Beam-it, Debian still won't distribute it since they say they do not have the permission to do so (confused yet?). However, if Beam-it has an exception of some kind granting everyone the explicit permission to link to whatever proprietary code they used, then Debian would include it.
I agree entirely, except that I have not seen a written document anywhere. I did eventually get around to fumbling around the website without logging in anywhere (IMHO, it is rather poorly laid out) and downloaded the tarball. Beam-It appears to include code from three or four different GPLed applications, and the library in question is most certainly not free software by any means. If any of the authors of these applications were to make noise, life would get interesting for everyone who is distributing Beam-It. Fear of things like that is one of the reasons Debian does not distribute KDE, as far as I recall. A commercial distribution would probably get away with destroying all CDs and the like and burning new ones. Debian is a volunteer effort which cannot afford the same sort of resources that eg. Red Hat does. Though once again, I am merely a Debian user, not a developer. (And IANAL.)
Of course, lest you misconstrue my comments,...
I hope not. You've been very pleasant to discuss with so far.
... not every Debian developer holds to this current view. But being a democratic-oligarchy, they can't include KDE until everyone important agrees to.
It is true that not everyone within Debian agrees with the official line. But Debian is a true democracy, and as far as I know these things are decided by majority decisions, not by "important people", whoever that might be.
There are probably five different and intellectually valid interpretations of the GPL as it applies to this situation.
"Intellectually valid", whatever that means, maybe. Legally, there can only be one. The argument, as far as I have been able to discern, is as to whether or not the restrictions of the QPL are sufficient to make it proprietary, which in the context of the GNU GPL is defined to be anything that is more restrictive than the GPL. I believe there is broad agreement that libraries that are generally agreed upon to be proprietary may not be linked with GPLed code in this fashion (unless you're the copyright holder, of course).
In this case, what we're talking about is almost certainly not the QPL. Once again, is there anyone with any account who would care to check this out?
Debian subscribes to the one that says you can't unless you include a disclaimer or additional exception. This certainly isn't the view of any of the other distributions, some of whome employ GNU members.
As far as I can see, either the original poster is wrong when he uses the wording "library" or the choice of GPL is not appropriate.
What I mean by that is that since the GNU GPL does not allow linking to proprietary libraries, unless the library in question is a core part of the os, (and then only if the GPLed app is not distributed with the os itself), it would seem that nobody except for the copyright owners are allowed to distribute this app.
I did not check this out on the website myself, since they apparantly wanted me to register, which I will not do on principle. So could someone with less scruples than me go and check this out?
The net effect of this could be that eg. Debian will not distribute Beam-It, in the same way that they will not / can not distribute KDE.
I would like to stress again that I could not check this out for myself, so could someone else please do it? For all we know, the orginal poster simply expressed himself inaccurately. Thanks...
I know a lot of you look up to Richard Stallman, he seems like a great guy, champion of the community and all that. But he's not; in fact his antics are hurting us, and our cause more then anything else. We need to recognize RMS for what he is. A money grubbing hippy, who will happily whore himself for money to anyone with more then $20.
You're flame-baiting, troll. Money grubbing? It is a pretty well-known fact that RMS has turned down numerous offers to partake in the current IPO craze and get very, very rich very, very quickly. He did so because the companies in question were involved with proprietary software, which is against his personal code of ethics. I do not mean to say that those who have accepted such offers and gotten rich, such as ESR, are evil, but it is preposterous to say that RMS is in it for the money. Sure, RMS can and do sell his services as a consultant for an exorbitant fee, but so what? I would as well, if I could. All of RMS' work is GPLed, so there is no reason at all to complain as far as I'm concerned.
Now, of course RMS got a quarter-million dollar McArthur grant. And what did he spend it on? Devoting more time to free software, and less to earn money to live off. In it for the money, indeed.
Listen to ESRs criticisms of Stallman, who said about the man "shut up and show me the code."
Really? Although they have been known to disagree quite vocaly in public fora, the last time I checked ESR has actually gone on record by stating publicly that he admires RMS for his code and his skills. What are you bluthering about?
And he's right. With all his pompous punditry, RMS has done hardly any real coding for the community. Unlike people like Linus and ESR, who have made real code contributions. RMS hasn't written anything remotely useful in over a decade!
Really? Gcc, emacs... RMS spends less time coding and more time being an administrator these days, but no-one in their right mind would suggest that these contributions are in any way trivial, even if they have been hacked on extensively by other people for a long time.
Of course, I agree with him on the issue of the UCITA. But I think we, as a community need to stop putting him on this pedestal. He is no one, other then a game player, who's grabbed hold of the Open Source movement to make his fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. He agrees with the Unabomber: Advanced technology offers a threat to the human species.
What's the big deal? The existence of things such as nuclear bombs and biological weapons would not at all be possible without advanced technology. As such, advanced technology is certainly a threat to the human species (and the rest of the planet as well).
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not some sort of luddite. I don't think we're all going to kill ourselves tomorrow. I happen to be a bit more optimisitic than that, and I think that we'll avoid any planet-devastating mishaps in the forseeable future. But that doesn't mean that the dangers do not exist.
Whether it is theoretically feasible to replace bits of the GNU system with others does not have anything to do with whether or not it is the GNU system. For example, it might be possible to adapt some BSD libc to work with Linux, or to write a new one for scratch. But why bother when there is GNU libc already? Similarly for GNU fileutils, gcc, binutils and many more that I have probably forgotten.
I think it is rather telling of the differences in philosophy between the GNU folks and various others that RMS & Co. started out by creating the basic tools that you needed in order to be even able to create an operating system, such as a text editor and a compiler toolchain. These are tools that practically everybody in the free software movement uses, even those that otherwise have no relation to the GNU project at all.
Seriously, this license is intended mainly for software documentation, not novels. If you're writing software manuals and you can't get your head around LaTeX, texinfo or simple HTML then you have no business being a technical writer. LaTeX is very straight forward, I managed to typeset my first document with complicated mathematical symbols (I'm a maths student) within less than an hour.
Microsoft Word format is certainly proprietary, and if you don't know how much of a PITA it is to print, much less change, a reasonably complicated MSW document on a free os then you haven't tried. As RTF, I'm not at all that certain if it is proprietary in any real sense of the word, if the specification is publically available, but I'm no expert so I wouldn't pretend to give an authoritative answer.
What the hell was the moderator smoking when he marked this 'offtopic'? This is the GNU webmaster, and he is telling the truth; just go and look.
Not true. He's saying that illegal software copying, while not immoral, is not a good idea in general (since you can't easily modify it and learn from it etc.) and that it is better to create free software instead.
Go away, troll.
Lovely place, though. Very nice, green feel to it; even close to the centre. I'd love to live there.
Oh, come on; ligthen up. At least I didn't claim to be an expert on urban structure the way some people onQuite right. Personally, I think that this is probably, though I wouldn't know for sure, a result of Theo de Raadt's fairly well-know attitude problem. (Do a deja search on "Theo de Raadt" and RMS some time, or "Theo de Raadt, NetBSD and Core")
Did it ever occur to you that if things are breaking up all over the place, then the problem might be your computer, rather than the software? When I started clisp for the first time, I got an immediate segfault. I then went off and filed an important bug in the Debian bug tracking system. However, upon reboot it turned out that lots of files from all over my harddrive had gotten themselves corrupted. After fixing the errors and reinstalling clisp, it worked just fine. I still get lost clusters every time I fsck my harddrive, though--but this is most likely due to my computer being a pile of cheap crap.
In bash, you can use ^R to do a reverse incremental search in the command-line history. It's brilliant, I use it all the time.
Yes. 8-( Luckily, it seems to be up at 1 again. 8-) I don't think this is a problem in general, except if you post as 'Anonymous Coward', in which case you will quickly disappear from public view (read: go sub-zero) and thus never really get the chance to be moderated up again. If you're logged on, most people will still see you at 0. Personally, if I see a post which has clearly been unfairly moderated, I will often mark it 'Underrated' or 'Overrated' as appropriate, even if I would not have considered moderating it otherwise.
Incidentally, this is a good reason to set the limit to -1 if you've got moderator points. (I know you're encouraged to do so, but I somehow suspect that not enough people do.)
Indeed.
No you won't, and no they're not.
This would be a good point, were it not for the fact that Amazon has by now got a history of using patents offensively. In fact, the Boycott Amazon page goes some way to acknowledge this:
Realistically, would anyone have complained if Amazon had not started trying to enfore their patent? Off course not. This is even is spite of the fact that even the pontential of a lawsuit can and often does have a devastating inhibiting effect to a business.
Anyone with a certain minimum of knowledge about how computers and / or the internet works knows exactly how preposterous the one-click patent is. This patent is no different in that respect. The difference is that this patent is so much more blindingly obvious that anyone should be able to see why, with minimal rethoric required. This ought to make it a lot easier to fight the patent in court, and let's hope that Amazon's competitors do just that.
The state of the US Patent Office has been long lamented, in places such as the GNU website and the League for Programming Freedom. I personally believe that although some of the examples cited there, such as the use of XOR to highlit information on a bitmapped screen in an easily reverisble way, are, believe it or not, not sufficently obvious to the population at large that the average man and woman can be easily convinced.
Off course, being non-obvious to the average person is a subset of the legal requirements to obtain a patent--theoretically, a new patent may not be obvious, even if only to experts in the field. However, it has been obvious for a long time that the US Patent Office is blindingly incompetent in this regard. Maybe this time, we will have our day in court, and win it too.
Until then, I suggest that we all chip in and make a link to the Boycot Amazon page. Have you emailed Amazon to tell them what you think yet? I have.
Off course, this doesn't mean that one should hate Borland / Inprise / whatever any more or less than other non-free software companies, just that Borland has not given away something of great commercial value. Personally, I think it is just another attempt to resurrect a dead product using the market hoopla associated with Open Source. However, unlike Netscape, Borland is not doing this by actually making their product free software, but rather by diffusely associating themselves with Open Source. If BCC achieves any sort of popularity, there will be a for-charge, non-free "professional" edition out fairly quickly.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation ofpatent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patentissues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order,agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of thisLicense, they do not excuse you from the conditions of thisLicense.
The crucial point here is that the guy behind RTLinux would requireyou to note whether or not your real-time-os-under-linux is RTLinuxcompatible, and a whole slew of other things. However these areadditional requirements to the GPL, which are in general not allowed.Therefore, we would not be allowed to distribue RTLinux.
Or am I wrong? IANAL, are there any license-heads out there whowould care to comment? Anyone asked RMS or the FSF about this yet?
Go look it up in a dictionary.
Aside from the fact there is not even a glimmer of indication that RMS and the FSF will try or indeed wish to assume the honour for the work of the LDP, there is also the fact that the FSF has spent substantial resources on manuals and documentation. Take, for instance, RMS' offer of some time ago to pay a goodly-sized amount of cash for a good, free manual for GTK/GNOME programming.
What I would like to discuss is whether or not this case we're seeing here is a GPL misapplication (and notice that I do say misapplication rather than violation here) since this program is apparently built on top of a proprietary library. That would constitute creating a derived work which has restrictions additional to the GPL, which is the same sin that the KDE folks are accused of. Personally, I will withdraw judgement in the case of KDE.
In order: QT is as far as I know not a module in KDE, although that is where it is most often used, and despite the fact that it is very vital to KDE.I don't believe that dynamic linking or static linking makes a difference. "Creating a derived work", which is what the GPL (and copyright law in general) talks about is much more subtle than inclusion in a binary.
As for the GPL being binding on third parties, I am not sure what you mean. Anyone is free to use GPLed software however they see fit. The GPL covers redistribution of GPLed software. Since a priori one does not have a right to distribute software that one does not have copyright on without a license agreement, the only way in which one may distribute GPLed software is by accepting the conditions of the GPL. That is the cornerstone on which the GPL rests.
Absolutely. The KDE folks can do whatever they want to code that they have written. What Debian can or cannot do to KDE depends on the license agreement. Their opinion as to how far that license goes seems to be different from yours. Debian can only do what the license says. The KDE folks have certainly given informal permission to copy and distribute KDE many times. If KDE was to make this formal by adding "... in addition, you may link this program to the QT library." to their license, Debian would distribute KDE tomorrow - or so I am given to understand. Once again, I am not a Debian developer. As far as I can see, the only thing that KDE would loose by doing so would be the ability to adopt pre-existing GPLed software to work with KDE. (Of course, according to Debian they do not really have that ability to begin with, but this would pretty much constitute an admission.) However, this is one thing that the KDE folks should be wary of already, since there are people out there who do not agree with their reading of the GPL. On the other hand, if they did include the above clause in their license, they would be much more likely to be met with goodwill by free software authors who actually care about these things.I don't think that anyone really cares about the core of KDE since the KDE folks are certainly happy to let people distribute KDE. A more interesting question is GPLed code that has been adapted to work with KDE, such as kghostview.
I am not aware of anyone having resorted to legal steps against KDE. If that happened, it would be interesting news indeed...If code written by someone whose reading of the GPL coincides with Debian's (and the authors of the GPL) was adapted to work with KDE/QT, it would be very interesting to see what happened. Of course, no-one really wants to find out. This is why there will never be a kemacs under current conditions: everyone knows that this would almost certainly start world war three. 8-(
I agree entirely, except that I have not seen a written document anywhere. I did eventually get around to fumbling around the website without logging in anywhere (IMHO, it is rather poorly laid out) and downloaded the tarball. Beam-It appears to include code from three or four different GPLed applications, and the library in question is most certainly not free software by any means. If any of the authors of these applications were to make noise, life would get interesting for everyone who is distributing Beam-It. Fear of things like that is one of the reasons Debian does not distribute KDE, as far as I recall. A commercial distribution would probably get away with destroying all CDs and the like and burning new ones. Debian is a volunteer effort which cannot afford the same sort of resources that eg. Red Hat does. Though once again, I am merely a Debian user, not a developer. (And IANAL.) I hope not. You've been very pleasant to discuss with so far. It is true that not everyone within Debian agrees with the official line. But Debian is a true democracy, and as far as I know these things are decided by majority decisions, not by "important people", whoever that might be.In this case, what we're talking about is almost certainly not the QPL. Once again, is there anyone with any account who would care to check this out?
What I mean by that is that since the GNU GPL does not allow linking to proprietary libraries, unless the library in question is a core part of the os, (and then only if the GPLed app is not distributed with the os itself), it would seem that nobody except for the copyright owners are allowed to distribute this app.
I did not check this out on the website myself, since they apparantly wanted me to register, which I will not do on principle. So could someone with less scruples than me go and check this out?
The net effect of this could be that eg. Debian will not distribute Beam-It, in the same way that they will not / can not distribute KDE.
I would like to stress again that I could not check this out for myself, so could someone else please do it? For all we know, the orginal poster simply expressed himself inaccurately. Thanks...
Not really, just "nearly anywhere but the US" format...
You're flame-baiting, troll. Money grubbing? It is a pretty well-known fact that RMS has turned down numerous offers to partake in the current IPO craze and get very, very rich very, very quickly. He did so because the companies in question were involved with proprietary software, which is against his personal code of ethics. I do not mean to say that those who have accepted such offers and gotten rich, such as ESR, are evil, but it is preposterous to say that RMS is in it for the money. Sure, RMS can and do sell his services as a consultant for an exorbitant fee, but so what? I would as well, if I could. All of RMS' work is GPLed, so there is no reason at all to complain as far as I'm concerned.
Now, of course RMS got a quarter-million dollar McArthur grant. And what did he spend it on? Devoting more time to free software, and less to earn money to live off. In it for the money, indeed.
Really? Although they have been known to disagree quite vocaly in public fora, the last time I checked ESR has actually gone on record by stating publicly that he admires RMS for his code and his skills. What are you bluthering about?
Really? Gcc, emacs... RMS spends less time coding and more time being an administrator these days, but no-one in their right mind would suggest that these contributions are in any way trivial, even if they have been hacked on extensively by other people for a long time.
Bah. Go away, troll.