If you care enough about sound quality to ask whether Ogg or MP3 sounds better, then you should probably be using lossless compression, because it's guaranteed to sound the best. Hard disk is cheap enough that the difference in file sizes doesn't really matter anymore.
There are over a dozen lossless audio compression packages available. They all sound the same. I'll just note that FLAC is open source (GPL & LGPL), patent free, and has WinAmp and XMMS plugins available.
Writing a parser for Word's undocumented binary file format, and keeping it up to date, is a battle that you cannot win with Microsoft. So don't try.
One alternative is to use Word for performing the translation. Word has commands for saving documents in RTF format, which is also a bit of a moving target, but at least it is readable text. So write a tool that fires up Word, causes Word to read the document and save it as RTF, then quit. The tool then reads the RTF and spits out XML (StarOffice XML or some other DTD).
Don't forget, Atollo is
lego compatible.
So you can have your dodecahedrons and robotize them too.
Because those are not copyleft licences
on
Mozilla Relicensing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Read the FAQ. Mozilla is not relicensable under the Artistic license, the Python licence, etc, because those other licences are not consistent with the Mozilla project's goals. Quote:
Why didn't you just relicense the Mozilla code under a non-copyleft license (like the MIT or BSD licenses) that would be compatible with all other possible licenses?
Because historically Mozilla code has always been released under some form of copyleft licensing, and we wish to continue to use copyleft provisions to promote sharing of modifications to Mozilla code.
Note that the Mozilla code can be combined with code licenced under many other Open Source licences, like the Python or BSD licences, so there isn't a licence compatibility problem with these licences.
It took some digging to figure out what the real problem with the qmail license is. OpenBSD requires that all applications (including those in ports) play by the rules. One of those rules is that the root directory cannot be modified--this means that OpenBSD is guaranteed to work with a read-only root. qmail violates this rule, because it wants to create/packages. The qmail license explicitly forbids the OpenBSD team from changing qmail to put its files somewhere other than/packages.
nik says: Note that NetBSD and FreeBSD continue to include qmail in their ports trees. DJB's license forbids redistribution of modified binaries, but does not forbid distribution of a 'framework' for modifying the source code.
This is misleading. DJB's license forbids the ports framework from changing the behaviour of qmail to follow the OpenBSD rules.
If you read the email between Theo and DJB, you will discover that DJB is angry that qmail is being dropped from OpenBSD ports, but he also refuses to allow anyone to change the behaviour of qmail to conform to the OpenBSD requirements for where package files are stored.
If qmail was Open Source or Free software, then there would be no problem, because then the OpenBSD team would automatically have the right to adapt qmail to work with OpenBSD. But they do not have this right, and DJB has made it very clear that he will not allow anyone to make the necessary changes. So Theo did the right thing when he dropped qmail from ports.
If I was a leader of the Taliban, I'd be moving pretty quickly to put Osama Bin Laden under arrest, for lots of good reasons. If I was Bin Laden, I'd be resisting arrest, possibly with the help of my own personal army.
By "retaliate", I assume you mean that the U.S. should drop some bombs and kill a lot of innocent civilians, thereby radicalizing the surrounding population and generating a lot of new terrorists willing to die for their cause. That's how the U.S. got into this mess in the first place!
The Nuremburg trials are a much better model for how this situation should be dealt with. The individuals responsible need to be identified, brought to the U.S. (with as few civilian casualties as is humanly possible), and given a trial that is seen to be fair by the world at large. Alternatively, the trial could be held in a neutral country. This course is a lot more difficult to follow than simply dropping a few nukes on some random Arab countries--for one thing, in the worst case, some U.S. soldiers might die--but it's the right thing to do.
The downside is that the Chinese and Japanese action/monster flick producers that use this technology for film dubbing will also use Babelfish to translate the scripts.
"Maybe someday we will only need one piece of ID that we get at birth."
That'll be the one they tattoo on our foreheads, right?
No, it will be a chip implant. Microsoft will have patented all of the technical specs, so you will only be able to use MS software and equipment to read it, on threat of lawsuit. But it will be integrated with Passport, and it will be very convenient. You'll be able to buy groceries, rent videos, etc, just by walking past a detector. Cash will be outlawed (only people with something to hide care about anonymous transactions, right?), and the crime rate will be very low, since Passport will be a very useful tool for the Police in tracing criminal activity.
This scenario is not that far out.
I don't use cash much anymore--most of my transactions are credit card or Interact,
so there is already a pretty detailed electronic trail of my daily activities.
The government of Ontario has a very pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic bent, and are busy passing some pretty draconian laws to help the police combat organized crime.
Combine pervasive electronic surveilance, authoritarian governments and Microsoft, and we could be in for some interesting times.
The GPL is not a virus. It does not infect source code. If I hand in, as an assignment, some source code that I own, together with a GPL'ed header, none of my rights to my source code have been taken away. If I hand in, as an assignment, a binary compiled from GPL'ed source and source that I own, I am required, by the GPL, to make the source available, but that is implied in this context, right? But the professor cannot redistribute the binary or my source code unless I give him permission to do so--the GPL on his header file does not take away any of my rights. In this particular case, I have no doubt given the university a non-exclusive licence to my code, and it is this fact, not the GPL on the professor's header, that gives the professor the right to redistribute my source within the university community.
This sort of technology has been around a long time. HP's
Dynamo
project has been running since 1995.
When Dynamo is run on an HP PA-RISC and is used to emulate HP PA-RISC instructions, speedups of up to 20% are seen. That's pretty astonishing: you would think that emulating a processor on that processor would be slower, not faster.
Well, I hereby award bigbrotheraward.de (and Sven Tuerpe) this year's cluelessness award for slagging Apache without bothering to understand what access logging is for. I run an Apache webserver on my home machine, for personal and family use only, and I keep access logs. I get a lot of hits from 31337 haxor d00dz who are obviously trying to crash my server or find security holes. I log their IP addresses. Tuerpe
is a twerp if he thinks that I am victimizing these idiots by logging their attacks on my system: obviously, they are victimizing me.
The SMTP standard supports encryption, and sendmail (at least) has supported TLS encryption since last year; I believe that TLS support was made available for open source sendmail minutes after the RSA patent expired.
The advantage of putting encryption into your MTA is that the envelope is encrypted, not just the body. Plus, client software doesn't have to be modified.
If you are really paranoid, then you of course would want a combination of encrypted SMTP with a PGP encrypted message body, 'cause that provides end-to-end encryption combined with an encrypted envelope while the email is in transit.
is a software distribution that is neither "free" (according to RMS) or "open source" (according to the open source definition). It is incompatible with the Debian Free Software guidelines, so it can't be made part of the Debian distribution. RedHat won't touch it, for the same reason. I doubt that any of the groups that distribute free or open source operating system distributions will want to touch this puppy. And there is always LessTif.
This discussion of being fried by a microwave power satellite brings back fond memories of:
Home on LaGrange
Words: Bill Higgins and Barry Gehm c. 1978
Music: "Home on the Range"
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
And the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects.
We possess, so it seems, two of man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound. CHORUS
You don't need no oil, nor a tokamak coil,
Solar stations provide Earth with juice.
Power beams are sublime, so nobody will mind
If we cook an occasional goose.
INTERLUDE (to Oh, What A Beautiful Morning)
All the cattle are standing like statues.
All the cattle are standing like statues.
They smell of roast beef every time I ride by,
And the hawks and the falcons are dropping like flies...
I've been feeling quite blue since the crystals I grew
Became too big to fit through the door.
But from slices I sold, Hewlett-Packard, I'm told,
Made a chip that was seven foot four. CHORUS
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch,
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart
If we just find a big enough wrench. CHORUS
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodby,
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
I stand by my assertion that Linux is more popular, and I can only attribute that to the difference in licences.
That's just silly. There are lots of GPL'ed projects that are DOA, and there are lots of BSD licenced projects that dominate their niche.
I attribute Linux's popularity to Linus Torvalds: his charisma, and his ability to get people excited about his project and contribute to it.
It's a nice fantasy that if you are a totally antisocial wanker, you can guarantee the success of your lame project if you just choose the right licence, but I don't believe this for a minute. Other factors, like leadership skills and a good idea, are much more important.
Most of the comments on this story are FUD, and I think it's due to a misunderstanding. The truth is that Vixie is making the Bind development process more open, not less.
The current process is that whenever ISC finds out about a security bug in Bind, they don't put out a press release announcing the problem until they have a patch ready, and until the root server and other critical servers have the patch already applied.
This makes sense, right?
If they put out the press release before they started looking for a fix, then it would be a race to see if ISC could analyze the problem and create a patch before some hax0r reads the press release and brings down the root server.
Now, Vixie doesn't create the patch all by himself. There is an inner circle of people who create the patch and ensure that critical servers are updated with the patch before the press release goes out.
What is new is that ISC wants open up the membership of this inner circle. In other words, the process becomes more open, because more people will be able to join the inner circle, and there will be a public process and public criteria for joining.
If you administer a server running bind, and you aren't a member of the inner circle, then nothing will change for the worse. Announcements of security bugs in bind will continue to be accompanied by a patch that you can immediately download and apply upon learning about the bug. Bind will continue to be open source and free software, as it always has been.
So why the outrage? Do people really want Vixie to publicize bugs before anyone has had a chance to create a patch and fix the root server? Think about it.
More dirt on the "user friendliness" of early Unix systems. Here is the correct etymology for "dsw":
From: kent@decwrl.dec.com (Christopher A. Kent)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 4 Jan 90 08:44:51 GMT
That's not quite the way I have it. The original dsw stems from the days
when computers had front panel switches (dsw = "Delete from switches") and
Unix core files were restartable.
To delete a file whose name you couldn't type, you would obtain its
i-number (from ls or catting the directory), enter the i-number
in the switches, and run dsw. dsw would create a core file that, when
run, would delete the offending file.
I'm not sure when dsw changed from this functionality to the precursor
of rm -i, but I'm pretty certain that V5 dsw didn't use the front panel
switches.
I particularly liked the description of the ways in which Tops 20 is better than Unix, because it's a reminder that there is still lots of room for improvement in the basic design of Unix.
UNIX, however, is notoriously terse, cryptic and unfriendly, especially to novice computer users.... converting to UNIX did force us to give up some of the features which originally drew us to the DEC-20 in the first place.
The "user-friendly" shell provided by the TOPS-20 Exec, which gives help to those who need it but does not penalize expert users, is probably the feature that was missed the most. In UNIX, most commands are programs, assumed to have arguments of only options or filenames. This means you can't have "?" for commands and arguments in the shell, because the programs that would act upon the help request hasn't even started running yet.
... the DEC-20 program, once written, will contain built-in help, command and filename completion, etc, whereas the UNIX procedure can only be used by those who know exactly what they are doing. If you've typed "ls -s | sort" but don't know what the appropriate sort option is, typing question mark at that point won't do any good because the sort program isn't running yet.
tcsh (the Tenex C-shell) does provide command and filename completion via the TAB and CTRL-D commands. But this quote suggests that the TOPS-20 environment provides a nicer implementation of these features than tcsh is able to.
A special amenity of TOPS-20 is its retention of multiple generations (versions) of each file, giving the ability to revert to an earlier version should the latest one suffer from human error, folly, or tragedy. This, coupled with the ability to resurrect a file after it is deleted, imparts a sense of comfort and security that can only be appreciated once one moves to a more conventional and precarious file system. If you delete a file in UNIX, or create a new file with the same name as an existing one, then the old file is just plain gone. The "rm *" command in UNIX is simply too powerful, and too silent.
Another example of a useful facility missing from Unix. Although it's possible to, for example, reimplement 'rm' as a shell script that moves the file to be deleted into a "trash can" directory, TOPS-20 provides a much more powerful facility for undoing file system changes that is implemented at the file system level.
Another important feature of TOPS-20 is the logical device name, which can be defined in infinite variety for the system as a whole, and for each individual user. Each logical name can point to a particular device and/or directory, or to a whole series of them, to be searched in order. These are built into the operating system itself, whereas the notion of PATH and CDPATH are afterthoughts, grafted into the UNIX shell, not available from within programs, and not applicable outside their limited spheres of operation.
Plan 9 implements this idea at the file system level, and, according to Rob Pike's papers on the subject, it adds considerably to the gracefulness and expressive power of Plan 9.
That would make no sense to dual license GPL + BSD
I'm well aware of this, of course. It makes no sense from a technical point of view.
But the GPL is a powerful brand name,
and the presence of the magic words "GNU General Public Licence" in the LICENCE file is like a Certification of Software Freedom for many people, reassuring them that their rights as software consumers are being fully protected.
That's why I hypothesize that a dual licence might be more acceptable than a BSD licence or public domain to many consumers who prefer GPLed software to BSD licenced software.
I find it extremely unlikely that anyone would have a problem with [public domain] (but you never know since there are alot of morons out there)
It's not just the morons; it's also the members of the Free Software Foundation.
I know someone who claims he was harrassed by RMS who tried to badger him into GPLing his public domain software so that it would be pure enough for the FSF to use and redistribute.
Suppose I want to release some source code, and I want the code to be useable by the entire free & open source community, or by the largest possible subset. Which licence should I use?
In theory, I should release my source code to the public domain. That seems to be what this article is advocating. The problem with public domain, or the X11/new BSD licence, is many SlashDotters (partisans of the "Free Software" camp) will boycott my code because it isn't GPL'ed, and therefore "doesn't protect their rights" as a consumer. I don't personally know anyone who believes this, but I have corresponded with people holding this opinion.
If, on the other hand, I GPL my code, then partisans of the BSD camp will boycott the code because it is GPLed, and therefore can't be mixed with BSD or public domain code without "contaminating" it. I know lots of people who hold this opinion. Another problem with the GPL is that it seems to be incompatible with most other Open Source licences. According to gnu.org,
the GPL is incompatible with 20 of 34 free software licences
.
I don't want people to boycott my software for licence incompatibility reasons,
I don't want the licence on my software to used as an excuse to perpetuate another KDE debacle.
It is probably impossible for me to find any way to distribute my software that won't lead to boycotts for ideological reasons.
I have considered using a dual licence, BSD + GPL.
Maybe that would lead to fewer boycotts, but maybe I would be boycotted by both the BSD and the GPL partisans.
I'd be interested in hearing from people who boycott software for ideological reasons comment on this idea: would you boycott dual licence BSD + GPL software on the grounds of insufficient purity, or would it be okay to use it?
Ultimately, I have no control over ideological boycotts, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it.
I do have control over licence incompatibility, though, so from this point of view, I should choose public domain, the new BSD licence, or a dual BSD + GPL as mentioned earlier. All of these choices would be compatible with any other open source/free software licence.
I've seen Bernard Hodson's stuff on the net before. He has a Forth interpreter and a library of subroutines that occupies less than 32K, and he has been making grandious claims about his software for years. The last time around, he was claiming that his software constituted a revolutionary new "gene based" approach to programming (he calls Forth subroutines "genes"), and, just like this time around, he was making a big deal about his Forth system being equivalent to a Turing machine
I guess he had problems convincing people to program in Forth, because now he has a Java front end.
Slashdot Mirror
There are over a dozen lossless audio compression packages available. They all sound the same. I'll just note that FLAC is open source (GPL & LGPL), patent free, and has WinAmp and XMMS plugins available.
Doug Moen.
Writing a parser for Word's undocumented binary file format, and keeping it up to date, is a battle that you cannot win with Microsoft. So don't try.
One alternative is to use Word for performing the translation. Word has commands for saving documents in RTF format, which is also a bit of a moving target, but at least it is readable text. So write a tool that fires up Word, causes Word to read the document and save it as RTF, then quit. The tool then reads the RTF and spits out XML (StarOffice XML or some other DTD).
Doug Moen.
Don't forget, Atollo is lego compatible. So you can have your dodecahedrons and robotize them too.
It took some digging to figure out what the real problem with the qmail license is. OpenBSD requires that all applications (including those in ports) play by the rules. One of those rules is that the root directory cannot be modified--this means that OpenBSD is guaranteed to work with a read-only root. qmail violates this rule, because it wants to create /packages. The qmail license explicitly forbids the OpenBSD team from changing qmail to put its files somewhere other than /packages.
nik says: Note that NetBSD and FreeBSD continue to include qmail in their ports trees. DJB's license forbids redistribution of modified binaries, but does not forbid distribution of a 'framework' for modifying the source code.
This is misleading. DJB's license forbids the ports framework from changing the behaviour of qmail to follow the OpenBSD rules.
If you read the email between Theo and DJB, you will discover that DJB is angry that qmail is being dropped from OpenBSD ports, but he also refuses to allow anyone to change the behaviour of qmail to conform to the OpenBSD requirements for where package files are stored.
If qmail was Open Source or Free software, then there would be no problem, because then the OpenBSD team would automatically have the right to adapt qmail to work with OpenBSD. But they do not have this right, and DJB has made it very clear that he will not allow anyone to make the necessary changes. So Theo did the right thing when he dropped qmail from ports.
If I was a leader of the Taliban, I'd be moving pretty quickly to put Osama Bin Laden under arrest, for lots of good reasons. If I was Bin Laden, I'd be resisting arrest, possibly with the help of my own personal army.
Doug Moen.
By "retaliate", I assume you mean that the U.S. should drop some bombs and kill a lot of innocent civilians, thereby radicalizing the surrounding population and generating a lot of new terrorists willing to die for their cause. That's how the U.S. got into this mess in the first place!
The Nuremburg trials are a much better model for how this situation should be dealt with. The individuals responsible need to be identified, brought to the U.S. (with as few civilian casualties as is humanly possible), and given a trial that is seen to be fair by the world at large. Alternatively, the trial could be held in a neutral country. This course is a lot more difficult to follow than simply dropping a few nukes on some random Arab countries--for one thing, in the worst case, some U.S. soldiers might die--but it's the right thing to do.
Doug Moen
The downside is that the Chinese and Japanese action/monster flick producers that use this technology for film dubbing will also use Babelfish to translate the scripts.
Not the entire internet. Only 25% of the web uses IIS servers. The rest is mostly Apache.
Frankly, if all of the IIS servers disappeared off the web tomorrow, I wouldn't shed a tear. None of the sites I care about would be affected.
That'll be the one they tattoo on our foreheads, right?
No, it will be a chip implant. Microsoft will have patented all of the technical specs, so you will only be able to use MS software and equipment to read it, on threat of lawsuit. But it will be integrated with Passport, and it will be very convenient. You'll be able to buy groceries, rent videos, etc, just by walking past a detector. Cash will be outlawed (only people with something to hide care about anonymous transactions, right?), and the crime rate will be very low, since Passport will be a very useful tool for the Police in tracing criminal activity.
This scenario is not that far out. I don't use cash much anymore--most of my transactions are credit card or Interact, so there is already a pretty detailed electronic trail of my daily activities. The government of Ontario has a very pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic bent, and are busy passing some pretty draconian laws to help the police combat organized crime. Combine pervasive electronic surveilance, authoritarian governments and Microsoft, and we could be in for some interesting times.
The GPL is not a virus. It does not infect source code. If I hand in, as an assignment, some source code that I own, together with a GPL'ed header, none of my rights to my source code have been taken away. If I hand in, as an assignment, a binary compiled from GPL'ed source and source that I own, I am required, by the GPL, to make the source available, but that is implied in this context, right? But the professor cannot redistribute the binary or my source code unless I give him permission to do so--the GPL on his header file does not take away any of my rights. In this particular case, I have no doubt given the university a non-exclusive licence to my code, and it is this fact, not the GPL on the professor's header, that gives the professor the right to redistribute my source within the university community.
Doug Moen.
Well, I hereby award bigbrotheraward.de (and Sven Tuerpe) this year's cluelessness award for slagging Apache without bothering to understand what access logging is for. I run an Apache webserver on my home machine, for personal and family use only, and I keep access logs. I get a lot of hits from 31337 haxor d00dz who are obviously trying to crash my server or find security holes. I log their IP addresses. Tuerpe is a twerp if he thinks that I am victimizing these idiots by logging their attacks on my system: obviously, they are victimizing me.
You misunderstood. I was trying to say that you need to use PGP if you want end-to-end encryption of the message body.
The advantage of putting encryption into your MTA is that the envelope is encrypted, not just the body. Plus, client software doesn't have to be modified.
If you are really paranoid, then you of course would want a combination of encrypted SMTP with a PGP encrypted message body, 'cause that provides end-to-end encryption combined with an encrypted envelope while the email is in transit.
is a software distribution that is neither "free" (according to RMS) or "open source" (according to the open source definition). It is incompatible with the Debian Free Software guidelines, so it can't be made part of the Debian distribution. RedHat won't touch it, for the same reason. I doubt that any of the groups that distribute free or open source operating system distributions will want to touch this puppy. And there is always LessTif.
Home on LaGrange
Words: Bill Higgins and Barry Gehm c. 1978
Music: "Home on the Range"
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
And the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects.
We possess, so it seems, two of man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound. CHORUS
You don't need no oil, nor a tokamak coil,
Solar stations provide Earth with juice.
Power beams are sublime, so nobody will mind
If we cook an occasional goose.
INTERLUDE (to Oh, What A Beautiful Morning)
All the cattle are standing like statues.
All the cattle are standing like statues.
They smell of roast beef every time I ride by,
And the hawks and the falcons are dropping like flies...
I've been feeling quite blue since the crystals I grew
Became too big to fit through the door.
But from slices I sold, Hewlett-Packard, I'm told,
Made a chip that was seven foot four. CHORUS
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch,
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart
If we just find a big enough wrench. CHORUS
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodby,
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
Yahoo has been blocked for some time by the censorware used at my wife's elementary school.
That's just silly. There are lots of GPL'ed projects that are DOA, and there are lots of BSD licenced projects that dominate their niche.
I attribute Linux's popularity to Linus Torvalds: his charisma, and his ability to get people excited about his project and contribute to it.
It's a nice fantasy that if you are a totally antisocial wanker, you can guarantee the success of your lame project if you just choose the right licence, but I don't believe this for a minute. Other factors, like leadership skills and a good idea, are much more important.
The current process is that whenever ISC finds out about a security bug in Bind, they don't put out a press release announcing the problem until they have a patch ready, and until the root server and other critical servers have the patch already applied. This makes sense, right? If they put out the press release before they started looking for a fix, then it would be a race to see if ISC could analyze the problem and create a patch before some hax0r reads the press release and brings down the root server.
Now, Vixie doesn't create the patch all by himself. There is an inner circle of people who create the patch and ensure that critical servers are updated with the patch before the press release goes out.
What is new is that ISC wants open up the membership of this inner circle. In other words, the process becomes more open, because more people will be able to join the inner circle, and there will be a public process and public criteria for joining.
If you administer a server running bind, and you aren't a member of the inner circle, then nothing will change for the worse. Announcements of security bugs in bind will continue to be accompanied by a patch that you can immediately download and apply upon learning about the bug. Bind will continue to be open source and free software, as it always has been.
So why the outrage? Do people really want Vixie to publicize bugs before anyone has had a chance to create a patch and fix the root server? Think about it.
From: kent@decwrl.dec.com (Christopher A. Kent)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 4 Jan 90 08:44:51 GMT
That's not quite the way I have it. The original dsw stems from the days when computers had front panel switches (dsw = "Delete from switches") and Unix core files were restartable.
To delete a file whose name you couldn't type, you would obtain its i-number (from ls or catting the directory), enter the i-number in the switches, and run dsw. dsw would create a core file that, when run, would delete the offending file.
I'm not sure when dsw changed from this functionality to the precursor of rm -i, but I'm pretty certain that V5 dsw didn't use the front panel switches.
== Doug Moen ==
== Doug Moen ==
I'm well aware of this, of course. It makes no sense from a technical point of view. But the GPL is a powerful brand name, and the presence of the magic words "GNU General Public Licence" in the LICENCE file is like a Certification of Software Freedom for many people, reassuring them that their rights as software consumers are being fully protected. That's why I hypothesize that a dual licence might be more acceptable than a BSD licence or public domain to many consumers who prefer GPLed software to BSD licenced software.
I find it extremely unlikely that anyone would have a problem with [public domain] (but you never know since there are alot of morons out there)
It's not just the morons; it's also the members of the Free Software Foundation. I know someone who claims he was harrassed by RMS who tried to badger him into GPLing his public domain software so that it would be pure enough for the FSF to use and redistribute.
In theory, I should release my source code to the public domain. That seems to be what this article is advocating. The problem with public domain, or the X11/new BSD licence, is many SlashDotters (partisans of the "Free Software" camp) will boycott my code because it isn't GPL'ed, and therefore "doesn't protect their rights" as a consumer. I don't personally know anyone who believes this, but I have corresponded with people holding this opinion.
If, on the other hand, I GPL my code, then partisans of the BSD camp will boycott the code because it is GPLed, and therefore can't be mixed with BSD or public domain code without "contaminating" it. I know lots of people who hold this opinion. Another problem with the GPL is that it seems to be incompatible with most other Open Source licences. According to gnu.org, the GPL is incompatible with 20 of 34 free software licences . I don't want people to boycott my software for licence incompatibility reasons, I don't want the licence on my software to used as an excuse to perpetuate another KDE debacle.
It is probably impossible for me to find any way to distribute my software that won't lead to boycotts for ideological reasons. I have considered using a dual licence, BSD + GPL. Maybe that would lead to fewer boycotts, but maybe I would be boycotted by both the BSD and the GPL partisans. I'd be interested in hearing from people who boycott software for ideological reasons comment on this idea: would you boycott dual licence BSD + GPL software on the grounds of insufficient purity, or would it be okay to use it?
Ultimately, I have no control over ideological boycotts, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it. I do have control over licence incompatibility, though, so from this point of view, I should choose public domain, the new BSD licence, or a dual BSD + GPL as mentioned earlier. All of these choices would be compatible with any other open source/free software licence.
I guess he had problems convincing people to program in Forth, because now he has a Java front end.