It uses template metaprogramming, so any error messages you get are 7 screens long and take hours to decipher. That's probably why the technique never really caught on.
Has any licence been tested in court? Perhaps some commercial enterprise has threatened to sue or something, which may have resulted in a settlement, but has a court ever decided one way or another on *any* software licence?
Of course there's the problem with implicitly accepting a licence by opening a box or clicking a button. How vaild is that considering that real world contracts require signatures by both parties (in different coloured ink?) ?
What about the explicit denial of warrenty? Tort law (I believe) covers your Pinto's gas tank (and Firestone tires), but what about engine management software or the code in avionics systems? Can a licence wash the responsibility for due care and dilegence away?
If the GPL proves unenforcable, how will commercial licences be affected?
It's simple to say that if all the man power poured into all projects solving a certian problem were instead put into just one really good project, then the best possible solution would result. There Mack Truck sized flaw here is that you are assuming that humans are not involved.
As the article notes, it's primarialy a personallity problem which lead to this fork. Misunderstanding happen, people's feelings get hurt, and some people just want different things. These all lead to conflicts which can ultimatly harm a project. Face the facts about human nature: some people just can't work together.
Aside from personality conflicts, there's also the people of organizing a lot of people. Organization necessarially leads to buracracy. Lot's of people hate buracracy, and lots of people like to root for the underdog. In a large organization, which would be necessary to combine all the little projects, people coming on to the project would find the structure so unwieldly and confusing that they would just prefer to start over with a new organization.
Competition among open source projects lets users choose (where user may denote an end user like your Mom, or a corporate user like Apple) which is right for them. In this way, OpenSource is like capitalism. People get to choose the product which best fullfils their needs. The only difference (generally speaking) is that direct monetary cost for the product is removed from the equation (support, hardware, etc would still have to be considered).
One other point is that a lot of new coders who don't have enough skill to contribute directly to an established project will often release things they did to teach themselves as OpenSource. This doesn't really dilute the marketplace, since often such projects get abandonded quickly as their creators move on to bigger and better things, or are obviously lacking. So while it may sound reasonable to have one really good IRC client instead of a million half finished ones (and a few finished ones), the argument assumes that everyone is capable of contributing the high quality code as soon as the start to learn to program.
Distributing GPL'ed software in this manner is the ideal use of a technology like BitTorrent. It's legal, it helps take load off of RedHat's servers and pipes, and it helps get interesting new iso's to all the people who want then faster....
This is, IMHO, a very distasteful law that needs to be fought against. However, you don't need guns to have a revolution. A revolution can be started by contacting people in the news, your local news paper, the local tv stations, internet news providers in your area. If your ISP has a homepage where their users go, get them to put something up. Write your elected representative. Make yourself heard in the government. If enough people do this, change can happen. It is not necessary to shoot things or run over stuff in tanks. Public forums and debates work, protests in front of government buildings work (pile discarded & broken computer in or outside Parliment?), letters work. And best of all, don't re-elect the people who made this law happen (re: PC party in Canada after the GST came in). There are ways to have a revolution without guns.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. http://www.oonumerics.org/blitz/
It uses template metaprogramming, so any error messages you get are 7 screens long and take hours to decipher. That's probably why the technique never really caught on.
Somebody at Apple is a Slashdot and Firefly fan!
X is full of *percieved* weaknesses, which are much talked about by people who don't understand why it is the way it is.
What are you talking about?? It's an incredibly useful feature!
Has any licence been tested in court? Perhaps some commercial enterprise has threatened to sue or something, which may have resulted in a settlement, but has a court ever decided one way or another on *any* software licence?
Of course there's the problem with implicitly accepting a licence by opening a box or clicking a button. How vaild is that considering that real world contracts require signatures by both parties (in different coloured ink?) ?
What about the explicit denial of warrenty? Tort law (I believe) covers your Pinto's gas tank (and Firestone tires), but what about engine management software or the code in avionics systems? Can a licence wash the responsibility for due care and dilegence away?
If the GPL proves unenforcable, how will commercial licences be affected?
It's simple to say that if all the man power poured into all projects solving a certian problem were instead put into just one really good project, then the best possible solution would result. There Mack Truck sized flaw here is that you are assuming that humans are not involved.
As the article notes, it's primarialy a personallity problem which lead to this fork. Misunderstanding happen, people's feelings get hurt, and some people just want different things. These all lead to conflicts which can ultimatly harm a project. Face the facts about human nature: some people just can't work together.
Aside from personality conflicts, there's also the people of organizing a lot of people. Organization necessarially leads to buracracy. Lot's of people hate buracracy, and lots of people like to root for the underdog. In a large organization, which would be necessary to combine all the little projects, people coming on to the project would find the structure so unwieldly and confusing that they would just prefer to start over with a new organization.
Competition among open source projects lets users choose (where user may denote an end user like your Mom, or a corporate user like Apple) which is right for them. In this way, OpenSource is like capitalism. People get to choose the product which best fullfils their needs. The only difference (generally speaking) is that direct monetary cost for the product is removed from the equation (support, hardware, etc would still have to be considered).
One other point is that a lot of new coders who don't have enough skill to contribute directly to an established project will often release things they did to teach themselves as OpenSource. This doesn't really dilute the marketplace, since often such projects get abandonded quickly as their creators move on to bigger and better things, or are obviously lacking. So while it may sound reasonable to have one really good IRC client instead of a million half finished ones (and a few finished ones), the argument assumes that everyone is capable of contributing the high quality code as soon as the start to learn to program.
Distributing GPL'ed software in this manner is the ideal use of a technology like BitTorrent. It's legal, it helps take load off of RedHat's servers and pipes, and it helps get interesting new iso's to all the people who want then faster....
Hmmm, maybe apt-get could use BitTorrent...
This is, IMHO, a very distasteful law that needs to be fought against. However, you don't need guns to have a revolution. A revolution can be started by contacting people in the news, your local news paper, the local tv stations, internet news providers in your area. If your ISP has a homepage where their users go, get them to put something up. Write your elected representative. Make yourself heard in the government. If enough people do this, change can happen. It is not necessary to shoot things or run over stuff in tanks. Public forums and debates work, protests in front of government buildings work (pile discarded & broken computer in or outside Parliment?), letters work. And best of all, don't re-elect the people who made this law happen (re: PC party in Canada after the GST came in). There are ways to have a revolution without guns.