Once they could select their username from a list that made it possible to give each family member an individual and run them in low privileged accounts.
Others above suggest running W98 to avoid viri.
Well, cheer up, friends! If you can find an old version of IE (I think 4 or thereabouts), it comes with "Family Login", which -- ta-daa! -- lets you select your username from a list! It has to be activated in (would you believe) the Network Properties screen...
(Then, of course, you uninstall IE so nobody will use it by mistake...)
So you can run W98 and have your user-picker too. My family has been doing that since... oooh, 1999 or so. W98 runs nearly everything jes' fine, as long as you use a PlayStation for heavy gaming...
We've planted the schneidics flag in "nemory": you *don't* remember something that *never* happened. We now believe that this "cold, dark information" composes the vast majority of information in the universe. We are currently investigating its application to the rest of the emerging field of schneidics. If you have experimental nemory data, please report it to our lab.
Suggested sources:
Federal Government's Press Release Archive.
Lecture notes from any history course at Columbia.
Mmmpf. Observe that the classification, though, is frequently modified for purposes of orchestration, due to the sound character of the instruments. One will occasionally, for example, find the French horn among the woodwinds, though obviously it's (from a physical point of view) a brass. Likewise the piano is frequently relegated to the percussion section, because whatever else it may sound like, it certainly doesn't sound like a viola....
Craig
Brown's cryptographic sophistication ...
on
Digital Fortress
·
· Score: 2, Funny
... is, judging from your description, about at the same level as his knowledge of religious history. How nice.
Really, given Brown's infatuation with silliness in DaVinci and the way he misses the boat in this one (unbreakable encryption? Just use a 4096-bit key; it'll take Moore's Law at least a couple years to catch up...), I have to wonder if the reason he doesn't do steamy sex scenes is because the technology is too advanced for him...
Not true. The semantics of the C 'include' directive are basically "copy-and-paste the contents of this file into the sources at this space" and the resulting code goes into the object file.
Do a hex dump of an.o file, for example. cpp does the including and pipes the result to the code generator, which binarifies it unrecognizably.
In the same way, the XFree86 team is considered one of the copyright holders of your application binary if you link it against their libraries or include their headers.
Nope. ONLY the FSF has ever interpreted library linking this way; that's what I mean by "viral". As Dawes says in one of his posts, their copyright ends at their API boundary.
The license doesn't say anything about linking to applications as being different from merging. Therefore, we must assume that they consider that to fall into the category of "merging". Therefore, the conditions apply.
The license doesn't say anything about setting fire to the curtains, either, so we must assume they consider that to fall into the category of
"merging".... Right....
By linking to XFree 4.4 and redistributing the program, you are now in violation of the GPL (at the very least) and, depending on EXACTLY what you do (how you link, what you display on your splash screen, etc.) perhaps the new XFree 4.4 license as well.
Wrong. If you can link KDE or GNOME to Solaris or Tru64 libs and redistribute it (which you can), then there is no reason *any* XFree license should prevent you from doing the same.
(And if you use the FSF "distributed with the OS" copout, then the question becomes, "in what sense, precisely, is commercial X11 distributed with the OS which doesn't also apply to XFree with SuSE or RedHat?")
The distros are being stampeded; if you take a look at http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html and
check out some of the ones on the "compatible" list -- e.g.
-- it's obvious that many if not most of the
compatible licenses require that certain statements be included in the documentation.
This whole brouhaha is horse hockey.
the Community isn't about to dump 14+ years of development by countless thousands to appease the vanity and contrariness of a few
I dunno; it seems to me that they're about to dump
a dozen years of XFree development (started by the
much-maligned David Dawes in 1991, and maintained
by the now-disbanded Core while at least half-a-dozen
"revolutionary" new GUI paradigm projects for Linux
started up with brass bands and died slow deaths) because
of a fair amount of vanity and contrariness from GPL fans
who don't really understand their own license....
Now get this straight.
There are no GPL problems with the new XFree license. The various distros are simply not thinking things through very clearly, and/or using the license as an excuse to do something they wanted to do anyway.
There are only a bunch of personality clashes. Notice that these two licenses (only partially reproduced here) are regarded as "compatible with the GPL" by the FSF:
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty
disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of
Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software
without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including
all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall
Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or
any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits,
whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action,
arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this
software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the Intel Corporation nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
software without specific prior written permission.
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the
documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical
matter, this means that there are already a huge number
of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in
any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly
start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever
to the distro's documentation? Give me a break;
incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the
least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree
version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86
group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's
clearly a gifted hacker). Likewise some XF86 contributors may
justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing
decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the
proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly
(whether RMS says so or not).
Now, even if it were incompatible with the GPL, how could it possibly be a violation of the GPL to link GPLed code with it, since GPLed code is linked all the time with libraries from Sun, Digital, and even [gasp!] Microsoft?
As to having to acknowledge XFree in every linked program, remember that software licenses are typically not viral. That is, if you write something with Turbo C, the Borland license has no effect at all on what you can do with your program. The FSF's licenses were specifically written to be viral; MIT and BSD licenses, for examp
The real question is why all of these distros have gone off the deep end. Debian I can understand; RedHat and OpenBSD are a surprise -- they generally have more sense.
There is no licensing issue here. There are only a bunch of personality clashes. Notice that these two licenses (only partially reproduced here) are regarded as "compatible with the GPL" by the FSF:
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty
disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of
Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software
without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including
all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall
Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or
any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits,
whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action,
arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this
software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the Intel Corporation nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
software without specific prior written permission.
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the
documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical
matter, this means that there are already a huge number
of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in
any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly
start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever
to the distro's documentation? Give me a break;
incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the
least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree
version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86
group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's
clearly a gifted and dedicated hacker; without him there would be no XFree). Likewise some XF86 contributors may
justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing
decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the
proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly
(whether RMS says it or not).
So what if the new XF86 license is incompatible with the GPL? Well, that means that the redistribution of any GPL'd software that links against XF86 software (such as xlibs) is a license violation, and therefore illegal. So the redistribution of e.g. GNOME, KDE, etc., under these circumstances would be illegal.
OK, so every copy of KDE and GNOME running on a Solaris or Tru64 box was either a) actually compiled on the box it's running on, or b) distributed illegally in binary?
Because the licenses for Sun and DigipaqHP implementations of X11 are about as GPL-incompatible as you can get.
(And if you use the FSF's "normally distributed
with the operating system" dodge, then I'll just point out that RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo and the rest normally "distribute X11 with the operating system", too.)
This whole brouhaha is just another sign that, by and large, the code produced by the open source community is of much higher quality than its level of thought on non-technical issues....
>> If your program includes any of the X include files, you've now
merged it with those files,
No, you haven't. If you distribute the source, you've mentioned the header files. If you're distributing binary, then the header files are nowhere to be found (they're not merged; they've been eaten).
If you've statically linked, then the license simply doesn't apply, since only the GPL and LGPL even pretend to apply to linked library code; the FSF's interpretation of "derived work" is completely idiosyncratic -- they share it only with SCO.
The whole notion of a "viral" software license is purely a creation of the FSF. Look at the software licenses for, e.g. the old Lattice C, Borland code, and so on -- it would never even occur to these guys that their license could have any effect at all on something written with it.
The GPL is viral only because it is specifically written to be. More normal licenses -- such as this one -- are not.
There is no issue. There is only a bunch of personality clashes. Notice that these two licenses (only partially reproduced here) are regarded as "compatible with the GPL" by the FSF:
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty
disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of
Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software
without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including
all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall
Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or
any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits,
whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action,
arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this
software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the Intel Corporation nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
software without specific prior written permission.
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical matter, this means that there are already a huge number of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever to the distro's documentation? Give me a break; incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86 group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's clearly a gifted hacker). Likewise some XF86 contributors may justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly (whether RMS says it or not).
So, what do either of them have to lose by simply releasing all of their newly acquired copyrights and licenses into the public domain?
In fact, when there was a real Caldera, Ransom Love (then CEO) did release the source to many of the "classic" versions of UNIX publicly under a BSD-style license. If I recall correctly, he was asked about releasing the most recent versions (the various SysVs) and replied to the effect that he would have liked to, but there was so much third-party IP in it that it would have taken a couple of lawyer-years to make it releasable.
In retrospect, much of that third-party IP might have been Novell's, since they were/are still collecting royalties based on their purchase of the AT&T/USL copyrights. Hmmmm.....
Male minds don't have memory protection. Female minds not only have memory protection, they are shapely multiprocessing and have NUMA -- e.g. they remember that last year you neglected Valentine's Day, and they remember the phone number of their best friend in college although they haven't talked to her in years, but they only remember to have the oil in the SUV changed about once a decade.
IBM's strategy now is to give SCO all the rope they need, and as a result have them repeatedly and continually humiliated in court when their claims are shown to be absurd, baseless, and frivolous. Thus there will be no conceivable grounds for appeal when SCO is finally beaten to a quivering pulp, begging for either mercy or death.
Then, of course, IBM will turn its attention to its countersuit....
This strategy is specifically intended by IBM to discourage copycats. If it works, there will BE no "second round."
Well, I just ran some timings on my machine -- all are 2.4.1-ac1 in my usual configuration (modules not included):
2.4.1-ac1 make install over non-SMP kernel
1063.61 user 68.00 system 19:06.38 elapsed 98% CPU
ditto, make -j2 install over non-SMP kernel
1071.08 user 66.21 system 19:02.35 elapsed 99% CPU
make -j2 install over SMP kernel
1481.13 user 138.26 system 13:47.66 elapsed 195% CPU
MAKE='make -j2' make install over SMP kernel
1488.33 user 140.50 system 14:02.50 elapsed 193% CPU
make -j4 install over SMP kernel
1499.01 user 145.12 system 14:00.58 elapsed 195% CPU
My conclusions about my machine (twin 233MMX, 96Mb main memory):
"-jN" doesn't help noticeably on a non-SMP machine; Linux' disk caching is apparently too clever.
For the kernel -- which has a dense directory structure -- a top-level "make -j2" works at least as well as the "MAKE='make -jN'" version, which some recommend. If the source tree is flatter, it might be the reverse.
Any noticeable time saving for jN > num_cpus over jN = num_cpus is likely to be mostly absorbed by additional scheduling overhead.
Of course, YMMV, these timings are valid only for my particular ancient machine during the gibbous moon,.....
I think Hrunting is missing the point of the post. Of course the average user doesn't care about overclocking and has less than no interest in microsoldering; they should be made aware of the potential problem of counterfeit chips and urged to patronize reliable retailers who provide a decent warranty, and that's the extent of what they need to have pointed out to them.
But my interpretation of the original post is that the relevant information should be publicly available to those interested. Just as the average user doesn't know or care about motherboard jumpers, the semantics of the arguments of a Win32 command message, or the contents of/proc, it is nonetheless extremely useful and a Good Thing that this information is available to anyone who does care, for whatever reason.
Obviously, the counterfeiters already know how to do it. I fail to see what harm there might be in providing the same knowledge to those who would use it to look for counterfeiting.
> stability, from what I recall, has nothing to do with how many features you have in something.
Quite right; there is no necessary connection. BUT the old truism "the more there is, the more there is to go wrong" still applies.
If you look at a chunk of code like, say, Microsoft Word, it's pretty obvious that the rampant featuritis of the last couple of releases has adversely affected its stability, and the Office programming team is in a "patch wars" state trying to keep ahead of the disaster potential of marketing's next bright idea.
The open-source development community has much less problem with this, both because of the many more eyes debugging the code and because the open model encourages much more bulletproof interfaces between modules. In addition, there's not the marketing pressure to shove something out the door, and the UNIX platform doesn't contribute to instability.
By the way, I really, really admire Enlightenment, and try out each new release, usually with an "oh wow!" Then I go back to my more pedestrian WMs, mainly because I find E just too distracting....
As to a 1.0 release of E, I'm reminded of the aphorism of the poet John Ciardi: "A great poem is never finished, it is simply abandoned." The same is probably true of great programs....
6.14 Can I get rid of the Trash/Templates/Autostart icons?
Yes. Simply edit $KDEDIR/bin/startkde and replace 'kfm' with 'kfm -w'. If this doesn't work, here's another way. Add the following lines to $HOME/.kde/share/config/kfmrc:
The effect is to take trash, templates, and autostart and put them into your home directory instead of your $HOME/Desktop directory. You will have to restart KDE, and you may have to delete the icons from the desktop the first time--be sure to move anything you have in autostart into $HOME/Autostart before deleting it from the desktop. And then you have a nice, clean desktop with no "My Computer" sort of look.
As an aside, posting anonymously when asking for help is not always the most sensible idea....
I use & like icewm, both because of its small footprint and because it gets in my way less than most other WMs.
As to "being a better windoze", remember that a large part of ease of use is exploiting what the user already knows. Ice does this quite well. Emacs is doubtless in some absolute sense a much better text editor than, say, NEdit or KEdit or gEdit, but which one would you install on you spouse's desktop. ("Let's see -- new frame. Alt-x 5 b -- of course!!")
Of course, I'm forced to spend my working hours coding in a Windoze environment, so I may be prejudiced.....
> Good programmers are a scarce resource, and good programmers who'll work for the love of it are even scarcer. This is true but misleading, rather like the greenies' projections of running out of some natural resource by year X based on "current reserves." As free software becomes more popular and widespread, the number of good programmers fiddling with it grows. Never fast enough, true; but just compare the number of talented people hacking Linux and X and other things now with the number doing so just a decade ago. Also bear in mind that programmers will, by and large, "work for the love of it" only on projects that they love; very few programmers would, for example, immerse themselves in some corner of a driver they didn't like or find interesting, just for the sake of some abstract desire to "make Linux (or *BSD or X or....) better." People who attack this or that project as a waste of time are showing a sort of control-freak mentality; the crucial point that they're forgetting is that the time being wasted (if any) belongs to the programmers who are putatively wasting it; it does not belong to some metaphysical hacker community, much less to any self-appointed arbiter of relative project goodness. Craig
There is a gap between those who use their public libraries and those who don't. There is a gap between those who use their VCRs for National Geographic replays and those who use it for Debbie Does Dallas. There used to be a gap between those who could afford a VCR and/or cable TV and those who couldn't, but technology and competition dropped the price to the point that more than 75% of families below the official US poverty line own at least one VCR and color TV. In due course, the same thing will happen with internet access. (The price is already down to something like $10/mo for 20 hours; not much for us nerds, but quite a bit for the beginner. And internet appliances are getting cheaper, as of course are full PCs...)
There's a gap between those who use cell phones and those who don't. There's a gap....
There are really 2 major gaps here: 1) the gap between those who want to use the internet to expand their knowledge, and those who don't care -- since nearly every public library and school now has internet connectivity available free -- and 2) the gap between those who, like Jon Katz, feel compelled to see Major Social Catastrophes Which Require Urgent Action around every corner (and feel even more compelled to go on and on about them) and those who believe that people as individuals will find a way to get what they need without the advocacy of fretting do-gooders.
RMS and the FSF are quite right that without the basic utilities they provided, Linux would not be a usable system. Fine.
On the other hand, as several posters point out above, without the impetus of Linux, the FSF project would be a little-known software island in the isolated Unix lake (as the Internet itself was, until a few years ago when ppp and the Web took off).
Anyone who looks into Linux at all -- even superficially -- cannot miss the ubiquitous references to the GPL and the GNU project. Ten million users, more or less, have had the opportunity to read the GPL (which they may or may not have done) and to study the FSF philosophy. Calculate the publicity value of that by, for example, figuring out how many full-page trade paper ads or CNN spots it would take to achieve the same exposure; the FSF certainly has no grounds for complaint about the spread of Linux -- which indeed represents a substantial victory for their vision; for that the FSF deserves congratulations, but not necessarily sympathy.
It is interesting to realize that one of the FSF's principal objections to the BSD license is that it requires (or used to require) crediting each software source -- The Regents of the UC, etc. etc. -- in all advertisements. Yet the GNU/Linux proposal essentially requires that one (admittedly major) software source be credited in ordinary speech, where we don't have the luxury of small print at the bottom of the page!
As to RMS himself, he deserves both our admiration as a fantastically gifted hacker and our respect for his utterly sincere and total dedication to his moral principles. Granting this respect, though, does not necessarily require that we agree with him totally on these principles -- I have a great respect for the Amish for the same reason, but I use computers and automobiles and toasters and dress colorfully (too colorfully, according to my wife). And it certainly does not require that we avoid pointing out that allowing the FSF sole authority to determine what constitutes "free" (speech) software is equivalent to allowing the Pope (or the Baptists, or....) sole authority to determine what constitutes Christianity.
RMS is a valuable resource in the open software movement. He is also eccentric, colorful, and (to some of us) maddening. What we need to do to keep the suits from being frightened of us is simply tell the truth: that there are many strains of philosophical thought in the hacker community that produced Linux, and RMS represents one of them. So does Bob Young, carefully groomed to avoid shocking them, and what the suits need to do is simply look at Linux itself and decide, as a technical and business question, what it can do to help them solve their problems.
>... colaborative software movement" (apparently he uses that term because he doesn't care about the free speach aspect of free software)...
OK, anyone who believes that the definition of the word "free" as applied to software is not solely determined by the FSF is automatically disqualified. Got it.
Sorry, BSD; all you guys will just have to go to the back of the bus. The bigots are making the rules here, and don't you forget it. Hey, Perlie! Get back! XFree, you've gotta change your name to X-Open (what? It's already been used? Then think of something else; "free" is our word!).
There, that's better. Geez, I'm getting tired of enforcing all this thought control in the name of Freedom....
Slashdot Mirror
Others above suggest running W98 to avoid viri.
Well, cheer up, friends! If you can find an old version of IE (I think 4 or thereabouts), it comes with "Family Login", which -- ta-daa! -- lets you select your username from a list! It has to be activated in (would you believe) the Network Properties screen...
(Then, of course, you uninstall IE so nobody will use it by mistake...)
So you can run W98 and have your user-picker too. My family has been doing that since ... oooh, 1999 or so. W98 runs nearly everything jes' fine, as long as you use a PlayStation for heavy gaming...
Craig
Suggested sources:
Mmmpf. Observe that the classification, though, is frequently modified for purposes of orchestration, due to the sound character of the instruments. One will occasionally, for example, find the French horn among the woodwinds, though obviously it's (from a physical point of view) a brass. Likewise the piano is frequently relegated to the percussion section, because whatever else it may sound like, it certainly doesn't sound like a viola....
Craig
Really, given Brown's infatuation with silliness in DaVinci and the way he misses the boat in this one (unbreakable encryption? Just use a 4096-bit key; it'll take Moore's Law at least a couple years to catch up...), I have to wonder if the reason he doesn't do steamy sex scenes is because the technology is too advanced for him...
Craig
Do a hex dump of an .o file, for example. cpp does the including and pipes the result to the code generator, which binarifies it unrecognizably.
In the same way, the XFree86 team is considered one of the copyright holders of your application binary if you link it against their libraries or include their headers.
Nope. ONLY the FSF has ever interpreted library linking this way; that's what I mean by "viral". As Dawes says in one of his posts, their copyright ends at their API boundary.
The license doesn't say anything about linking to applications as being different from merging. Therefore, we must assume that they consider that to fall into the category of "merging". Therefore, the conditions apply.
The license doesn't say anything about setting fire to the curtains, either, so we must assume they consider that to fall into the category of "merging".... Right....
-- Craig
Wrong. If you can link KDE or GNOME to Solaris or Tru64 libs and redistribute it (which you can), then there is no reason *any* XFree license should prevent you from doing the same.
(And if you use the FSF "distributed with the OS" copout, then the question becomes, "in what sense, precisely, is commercial X11 distributed with the OS which doesn't also apply to XFree with SuSE or RedHat?")
The distros are being stampeded; if you take a look at http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html and check out some of the ones on the "compatible" list -- e.g.
-- it's obvious that many if not most of the compatible licenses require that certain statements be included in the documentation.This whole brouhaha is horse hockey.
the Community isn't about to dump 14+ years of development by countless thousands to appease the vanity and contrariness of a few
I dunno; it seems to me that they're about to dump a dozen years of XFree development (started by the much-maligned David Dawes in 1991, and maintained by the now-disbanded Core while at least half-a-dozen "revolutionary" new GUI paradigm projects for Linux started up with brass bands and died slow deaths) because of a fair amount of vanity and contrariness from GPL fans who don't really understand their own license....
Craig
There are only a bunch of personality clashes. Notice that these two licenses (only partially reproduced here) are regarded as "compatible with the GPL" by the FSF:
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical matter, this means that there are already a huge number of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever to the distro's documentation? Give me a break; incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86 group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's clearly a gifted hacker). Likewise some XF86 contributors may justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly (whether RMS says so or not).
Now, even if it were incompatible with the GPL, how could it possibly be a violation of the GPL to link GPLed code with it, since GPLed code is linked all the time with libraries from Sun, Digital, and even [gasp!] Microsoft?
As to having to acknowledge XFree in every linked program, remember that software licenses are typically not viral. That is, if you write something with Turbo C, the Borland license has no effect at all on what you can do with your program. The FSF's licenses were specifically written to be viral; MIT and BSD licenses, for examp
There is no licensing issue here. There are only a bunch of personality clashes. Notice that these two licenses (only partially reproduced here) are regarded as "compatible with the GPL" by the FSF:
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical matter, this means that there are already a huge number of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever to the distro's documentation? Give me a break; incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86 group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's clearly a gifted and dedicated hacker; without him there would be no XFree). Likewise some XF86 contributors may justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly (whether RMS says it or not).
This is a tempest in a teapot. Let's grow up.
-- Craig
OK, so every copy of KDE and GNOME running on a Solaris or Tru64 box was either a) actually compiled on the box it's running on, or b) distributed illegally in binary?
Because the licenses for Sun and DigipaqHP implementations of X11 are about as GPL-incompatible as you can get.
(And if you use the FSF's "normally distributed with the operating system" dodge, then I'll just point out that RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo and the rest normally "distribute X11 with the operating system", too.)
This whole brouhaha is just another sign that, by and large, the code produced by the open source community is of much higher quality than its level of thought on non-technical issues....
No, you haven't. If you distribute the source, you've mentioned the header files. If you're distributing binary, then the header files are nowhere to be found (they're not merged; they've been eaten).
If you've statically linked, then the license simply doesn't apply, since only the GPL and LGPL even pretend to apply to linked library code; the FSF's interpretation of "derived work" is completely idiosyncratic -- they share it only with SCO.
The whole notion of a "viral" software license is purely a creation of the FSF. Look at the software licenses for, e.g. the old Lattice C, Borland code, and so on -- it would never even occur to these guys that their license could have any effect at all on something written with it.
The GPL is viral only because it is specifically written to be. More normal licenses -- such as this one -- are not.
--Craig
No, it doesn't, unless you're distributing actual modified XFree source. The XFree license -- old or new -- is not viral like the GPL for linked work.
--Craig
STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY COPYRIGHT NOTICE, LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER.
Copyright (c) 1989-1998 by Lucent Technologies
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs or any Lucent entity not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission.
Lucent disclaims all warranties with regard to this software, including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall Lucent be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.
The Intel Open Source License for CDSA/CSSM Implementation
(BSD License with Export Notice)
Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
[Disclaimer follows.]
Both of these licenses require specific content in the documentation of any distribution including them. As a practical matter, this means that there are already a huge number of acknowledgments, copyright notices, and so forth required in any substantial distribution, binary or otherwise.
And some are apparently claiming that a distro would suddenly start to include XF 4.4 without making any changes whatever to the distro's documentation? Give me a break; incorporation of one new acknowledgment somewhere would be the least of a distro developer's concerns with a new XFree version.
I have no idea what personal friction may be present in the XF86 group, or whether David Dawes is a great guy or a jerk (he's clearly a gifted hacker). Likewise some XF86 contributors may justifiably take offense at the process by which this licensing decision was made. But to pretend that this suddenly makes the proposed license incompatible with the GPL is just silly (whether RMS says it or not).
This is a tempest in a teapot. Let's grow up.
-- Craig
In fact, when there was a real Caldera, Ransom Love (then CEO) did release the source to many of the "classic" versions of UNIX publicly under a BSD-style license. If I recall correctly, he was asked about releasing the most recent versions (the various SysVs) and replied to the effect that he would have liked to, but there was so much third-party IP in it that it would have taken a couple of lawyer-years to make it releasable.
In retrospect, much of that third-party IP might have been Novell's, since they were/are still collecting royalties based on their purchase of the AT&T/USL copyrights. Hmmmm.....
Craig
Craig
-- Men are from DOS, women are from Be....
IBM's strategy now is to give SCO all the rope
they need, and as a result have them repeatedly
and continually humiliated in court when their
claims are shown to be absurd, baseless, and
frivolous. Thus there will be no conceivable
grounds for appeal when SCO is finally beaten
to a quivering pulp, begging for either mercy or
death.
Then, of course, IBM will turn its attention to
its countersuit....
This strategy is specifically intended by IBM
to discourage copycats. If it works, there will
BE no "second round."
Craig
I had some trouble with this, too. I don't know how SuSE handles it, but the solution for me was:
- xconfig & Compile alsa modules for my hardware.
- get & build alsa-tools (or utils?) from alsa.org
- run KDE & use the sound-settings utility to set up the alsa mixer properly.
Then everything seemed to be OK...Craig
- 2.4.1-ac1 make install over non-SMP kernel
- ditto, make -j2 install over non-SMP kernel
- make -j2 install over SMP kernel
- MAKE='make -j2' make install over SMP kernel
- make -j4 install over SMP kernel
My conclusions about my machine (twin 233MMX, 96Mb main memory):1063.61 user 68.00 system 19:06.38 elapsed 98% CPU
1071.08 user 66.21 system 19:02.35 elapsed 99% CPU
1481.13 user 138.26 system 13:47.66 elapsed 195% CPU
1488.33 user 140.50 system 14:02.50 elapsed 193% CPU
1499.01 user 145.12 system 14:00.58 elapsed 195% CPU
"-jN" doesn't help noticeably on a non-SMP machine; Linux' disk caching is apparently too clever.
For the kernel -- which has a dense directory structure -- a top-level "make -j2" works at least as well as the "MAKE='make -jN'" version, which some recommend. If the source tree is flatter, it might be the reverse.
Any noticeable time saving for jN > num_cpus over jN = num_cpus is likely to be mostly absorbed by additional scheduling overhead.
Of course, YMMV, these timings are valid only for my particular ancient machine during the gibbous moon, .....
Craig
But my interpretation of the original post is that the relevant information should be publicly available to those interested. Just as the average user doesn't know or care about motherboard jumpers, the semantics of the arguments of a Win32 command message, or the contents of /proc, it is nonetheless extremely useful and a Good Thing that this information is available to anyone who does care, for whatever reason.
Obviously, the counterfeiters already know how to do it. I fail to see what harm there might be in providing the same knowledge to those who would use it to look for counterfeiting.
Craig
> stability, from what I recall, has nothing to do with how many features you have in something.
Quite right; there is no necessary connection. BUT the old truism "the more there is, the more there is to go wrong" still applies.
If you look at a chunk of code like, say, Microsoft Word, it's pretty obvious that the rampant featuritis of the last couple of releases has adversely affected its stability, and the Office programming team is in a "patch wars" state trying to keep ahead of the disaster potential of marketing's next bright idea.
The open-source development community has much less problem with this, both because of the many more eyes debugging the code and because the open model encourages much more bulletproof interfaces between modules. In addition, there's not the marketing pressure to shove something out the door, and the UNIX platform doesn't contribute to instability.
By the way, I really, really admire Enlightenment, and try out each new release, usually with an "oh wow!" Then I go back to my more pedestrian WMs, mainly because I find E just too distracting....
As to a 1.0 release of E, I'm reminded of the aphorism of the poet John Ciardi: "A great poem is never finished, it is simply abandoned." The same is probably true of great programs....
Craig
6.14 Can I get rid of the Trash/Templates/Autostart icons?
Yes. Simply edit $KDEDIR/bin/startkde and replace 'kfm' with 'kfm -w'. If this doesn't work, here's another way. Add the following lines to $HOME/.kde/share/config/kfmrc:
The effect is to take trash, templates, and autostart and put them into your home directory instead of your $HOME/Desktop directory. You will have to restart KDE, and you may have to delete the icons from the desktop the first time--be sure to move anything you have in autostart into $HOME/Autostart before deleting it from the desktop. And then you have a nice, clean desktop with no "My Computer" sort of look.
As an aside, posting anonymously when asking for help is not always the most sensible idea....
-- Craig
As to "being a better windoze", remember that a large part of ease of use is exploiting what the user already knows. Ice does this quite well. Emacs is doubtless in some absolute sense a much better text editor than, say, NEdit or KEdit or gEdit, but which one would you install on you spouse's desktop. ("Let's see -- new frame. Alt-x 5 b -- of course!!")
Of course, I'm forced to spend my working hours coding in a Windoze environment, so I may be prejudiced.....
Craig
> Good programmers are a scarce resource, and good programmers who'll work for the love of it are even scarcer. This is true but misleading, rather like the greenies' projections of running out of some natural resource by year X based on "current reserves." As free software becomes more popular and widespread, the number of good programmers fiddling with it grows. Never fast enough, true; but just compare the number of talented people hacking Linux and X and other things now with the number doing so just a decade ago. Also bear in mind that programmers will, by and large, "work for the love of it" only on projects that they love; very few programmers would, for example, immerse themselves in some corner of a driver they didn't like or find interesting, just for the sake of some abstract desire to "make Linux (or *BSD or X or ....) better." People who attack this or that project as a waste of time are showing a sort of control-freak mentality; the crucial point that they're forgetting is that the time being wasted (if any) belongs to the programmers who are putatively wasting it; it does not belong to some metaphysical hacker community, much less to any self-appointed arbiter of relative project goodness. Craig
There's a gap between those who use cell phones and those who don't. There's a gap ....
There are really 2 major gaps here: 1) the gap between those who want to use the internet to expand their knowledge, and those who don't care -- since nearly every public library and school now has internet connectivity available free -- and 2) the gap between those who, like Jon Katz, feel compelled to see Major Social Catastrophes Which Require Urgent Action around every corner (and feel even more compelled to go on and on about them) and those who believe that people as individuals will find a way to get what they need without the advocacy of fretting do-gooders.
Craig
On the other hand, as several posters point out above, without the impetus of Linux, the FSF project would be a little-known software island in the isolated Unix lake (as the Internet itself was, until a few years ago when ppp and the Web took off).
Anyone who looks into Linux at all -- even superficially -- cannot miss the ubiquitous references to the GPL and the GNU project. Ten million users, more or less, have had the opportunity to read the GPL (which they may or may not have done) and to study the FSF philosophy. Calculate the publicity value of that by, for example, figuring out how many full-page trade paper ads or CNN spots it would take to achieve the same exposure; the FSF certainly has no grounds for complaint about the spread of Linux -- which indeed represents a substantial victory for their vision; for that the FSF deserves congratulations, but not necessarily sympathy.
It is interesting to realize that one of the FSF's principal objections to the BSD license is that it requires (or used to require) crediting each software source -- The Regents of the UC, etc. etc. -- in all advertisements. Yet the GNU/Linux proposal essentially requires that one (admittedly major) software source be credited in ordinary speech, where we don't have the luxury of small print at the bottom of the page!
As to RMS himself, he deserves both our admiration as a fantastically gifted hacker and our respect for his utterly sincere and total dedication to his moral principles. Granting this respect, though, does not necessarily require that we agree with him totally on these principles -- I have a great respect for the Amish for the same reason, but I use computers and automobiles and toasters and dress colorfully (too colorfully, according to my wife). And it certainly does not require that we avoid pointing out that allowing the FSF sole authority to determine what constitutes "free" (speech) software is equivalent to allowing the Pope (or the Baptists, or ....) sole authority to determine what constitutes Christianity.
RMS is a valuable resource in the open software movement. He is also eccentric, colorful, and (to some of us) maddening. What we need to do to keep the suits from being frightened of us is simply tell the truth: that there are many strains of philosophical thought in the hacker community that produced Linux, and RMS represents one of them. So does Bob Young, carefully groomed to avoid shocking them, and what the suits need to do is simply look at Linux itself and decide, as a technical and business question, what it can do to help them solve their problems.
Craig
OK, anyone who believes that the definition of the word "free" as applied to software is not solely determined by the FSF is automatically disqualified. Got it.
Sorry, BSD; all you guys will just have to go to the back of the bus. The bigots are making the rules here, and don't you forget it. Hey, Perlie! Get back! XFree, you've gotta change your name to X-Open (what? It's already been used? Then think of something else; "free" is our word!).
There, that's better. Geez, I'm getting tired of enforcing all this thought control in the name of Freedom....
Craig