(I've been releasing open source since before GPL existed, y'see, which is a big part of why I find it so offensive. GPL people seem to believe that the GPL created open source, but there were several vendors selling OSes built on BSD years before Linux had even been thought up.)
This is just too silly to let pass. The people who created the GPL don't have much liking for the term "Open Source" which either 5 minutes on Google or even just this site would tell you (actually I pretty sure you know this which makes it even sillier). Most of the people who created the term "Open Source" have been at loggerheads with the FSF at time or another. Furthermore, users of the GPL aren't a Stallmanite monolith. I use the GPL yet disagree with Stallman on Free Software as a Moral Imperative. Come to think of it, it is the same problem I have with your position as well only substituting the BSD advocate's take on "Freedom" for Stallman's. The only real "Freedom" I see is for developers to use the license of their choice and for derivative developers and users to either take it or leave it. I suppose end-users who don't develop get the most happiness here. They can just use any of the libre licensed stuff and not worry about it.
It's funny - people say that, but then they never explain how a business would ever want these restrictions in place. When I ask for an explanation, people usually point out some business they can think up which isn't hurt by these limitations, or point out a GPL company. Well, yay for you. The problem is, in neither of those cases does the GPL actually do good for the company, so that doesn't actually support the claim.
A company can open things up without giving away the store to their more closed competitors. MySQL, Trolltech, and others have a business model made possible by the GPL. You may believe they could get even richer if they did things your way but it seems they are actually businessmen too and that they like you seem to know what they are doing. Others like IBM can make improvements to useful codebases without again handing free gifts to their competitors. A competitor can make use of the code but only with the reciprocity the GPL enforces. There are valid choices other than the total giveaway of BSD/MIT and the anal retentiveness of an MS EULA. I've always found it interesting that hardcore BSD advocates find both of those utterly acceptable yet the GPL and other copyleft is utter anathema.
That doesn't mean I can't explain why I disagree with it. Please stop putting words into my mouth. All I said was that the limitations that the GPL imposes have significant costs to projects which use it, and that I find the ramifications thereof sad. At no point did I say any of the things you just attempted to shame me for.
I've put no words in your mouth. You said: "I believe GPLv3 is GPL's swan song, and I can't be happier that it's going away. It's time for people who write open source to stop closing it."
That is what prompted me to say "The GPL isn't going to go away just because you and your company doesn't like it." You expressed a very clear sentiment and got a very clear answer. Now I wasn't insinuating that you oppose license choice in others but you yourself are trying to "shame" others for using a license you disagree with. Those others you disagree with seem to see costs in BSD/MIT style licensing as well: you yourself may be a good citizen in contributing back to BSD projects. Others aren't. I understand that most BSD advocates find this acceptable. I don't have a problem with that either; I DO have a problem someone telling me I'm obligated to either use a free-for-all license for my code or to use a proprietary license for my code and that any other compromise is a moral failing of some kind. It isn't a one size fits all world. The GPL has been and will continue to be used and those using it are in no way misguided: it is the best way for them to achieve their goals. I'll allow that you may dislike their goals but those goals are no worse than proprietary software (which I'm also OK with).
I fully support you and your company's right to release under whatever license you like. But the GPL in both v2 and v3 trim isn't going to just go away because you and your company don't like it. I agree that the BSD and MIT licenses are more suitable for some purposes. Nonetheless the GPL (both forms) are also more suitable for some purposes and many of those are business purposes. The reality is that GPL code for all intents and purposes isn't available for those of your frame of mind to use; it isn't the end of world and no amount of sour grapes will change the fact that developers with other goals have just as much right to use the GPL as you have to use proprietary and BSD code.
That wouldn't be the effect of this. The best case scenario for the FSF is that someone redeems one of the MS vouchers for a version of Novell's Linux that contains GPLv3 code. Once this happens, MS will have a harder time enforcing patents that cover said code since defendents can cite GPLv3 terms as a defense. I'm not convinced that theory is legally sound but in any case, forcing MS to open code is NOT the goal here. The goal is use the conjunction of the GPLv3 and Novell's contract with MS to defang a large portion of the MS patent portfolio.
Novell could just decide to "take one for the team" and not honor the coupons. They would then be in a legal pickle with that customer but that is a better place to be than being sued by either MS or the FSF. GPLv3 is going to put Novell in more trouble than MS. The combination of GPLv3 and these vouchers is going to hurt either MS, Novell, or both. MS Legal will do everything they can to be sure Novell takes all the hits.
I suspect that in the end, GPLv3 won't have any effect on MS patents at all; it will eventually cause breaches of contacts between Novell and MS and between both companies and voucher holders.
I, in fact, have a paid for copy of Parallels 3. I will be asking for my copies of the LGPLed sources and will forward to the Wine project all correspondence received. Since I will be far from the only person doing this, I believe that the Wine project will be well within their rights as the copyright holders to insist on compliance.
you can just opt out of the Internet entirely and carry on running Linux or.*BSD or whatever.
You yourself have just shown that the EFF, FSF, and security experts have a genuine beef. Using Mickeysoft or "opting out of the Internet" is not an acceptable choice.
My last XP install was on a Toshiba laptop with a SATA chipset. It was a VERY difficult install. The installer required a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it to find the hard drive and proceed further. So I googled around, made the floppy (an odyssey in and of itself), and dragged out a USB floppy drive. I popped in the disk, the installer loaded the driver and I was able to format the drive. All seemed well until the copy files stage was hit and I was prompted to insert the SATA driver disk again. No matter what I did, it would not find the drivers. It turned out that the USB floppy driver included in the XP installer will only work properly with certain USB floppy chipsets that were out in the 2001 timeframe (quite the Google quest for THAT little nugget). I had to hit the boneyard for a really old USB floppy drive I had laying around. THAT finally gave me everything I needed to finish the basic install. I also had to track down and install 120 odd MB of drivers to get rid of all the yellow ! in the Device Manager once the basic install was completed. What was really fun about that is that Toshiba's driver page for the machine didn't have the Bluetooth software and couple of minor chipset items. So I had yet another Google Odyssey for that.......
This install of XP was every bit as fiendish as a seven year old version of Slackware if not more so. If I were feeling sadistic, I'd cheerfully hand this thing and the newer USB floppy drive to anyone who spouts "Linux is hard to install." with none of the background information. Yeah yeah, I know, I know, Vista will make all of this all better (Biggest Lie #7: The latest version will solve all your problems.)
I'll throw in another nugget: I always defrag as soon as I have a complete driver install+MS patches+Application Patches. The amount of red in the defrag analysis at that point is pretty amazing.
When fitness criteria are set in nature, the presence of a designer then becomes the thing you would have to design experiments or make predictions for. When fitness criteria are set in a lab, all we are demonstrating is that biological systems can adapt to them. If we select fitness criteria that come up in natural settings then we can experimentally verify adaptations seen in nature (neato). If one posits an Intelligent Designer, then you'll need a different sort of experiment to test for that. That fitness criteria are responded to isn't the point of contention. That they are set by an outside agency is. In a lab, we know that we are setting criteria. That is the point of experimentation after all. But it is a stretch to say that because we see things in nature that we see in a lab that all of nature must therefore be an experiment.
A further point, when we select fitness criteria in a lab we don't necessarily know what adaptations will take place. The results often don't look very designed (perhaps "engineered" is a better word) at all. For instance, experiments have been done with FPGA's to "evolve" things like working oscillators and radio receivers. Working results have used things like capacitive coupling between parts of the FPGA not usually meant to be directly connected in any fashion. What's more, when such "designs" are burned into identical model FPGA's they don't work because the internal tolerances differ. However both FPGA's would work fine for the sort of engineered circuits they are actually designed for.
Konqueror 3.5.6 Results:
From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)
This release of Konqueror has been their stable release since last January was supplanted by 3.5.7 last week. So Opera isn't the first. A stable released browser has been able to pass this test for at least 6 months. I don't know how 3.5.5 and before would have done on it.
All that said, Firefox tends to do better with the javascript heavy sites and has extensions I can't live without. If I were going to use something else it would probably be Konq though. When KDE4 comes out, Konq will be easily installed on Windows and OS X. That might get a bit more momentum behind it.
I didn't think a plane like the SR-71 would do much in the way of evading. They have to fly a particular route to photograph the site of interest. The whole idea was to fly so high and so fast that no gun, missile, or interceptor could match it. That proposition got increasingly dicier as satellites got better. The AI just has to goose the throttle maybe?
MS is going to lose a lot of their market share in the next few years, with Linux picking up most of the server business, and the Mac getting the desktops and laptops.
I'd like to think so but although your statement has some merit, it isn't a slam dunk. I'll reword it to fit reality:
MS is going to lose some of their market share in the next few years, with Linux picking up a bit more of the server business, and the Mac getting a few more desktops and laptops.
The wins that Mac and Linux(OpenSolaris?) can expect from dissatisfaction with Vista tend to be a bit inflated by fans of other OSes IMHO. New machines will be beefy enough to bury most of the performance hit and a service pack or two will fix the most glaring issues. It will take longer than MS wants but in 3-5 years most machines will be on Vista. The plus side is Linux and Mac will be stronger for it just not as strong as the advocates for those would like.
This is a joke that used to be told in Russia at least through the Seventies:
A man dies and his spirit appears before the Afterlife Commissar. "Your qualifications are such that you will not be permitted to enter Socialist Heaven. You may choose to go to either Capitalist Hell or Socialist Hell."
"What's the difference Comrade Commissar?"
"In Capitalist Hell, the Devil and his cadre of demons are ruthlessly efficient and will pound one nail in your ass each and every day. In Socialist Hell, the Devil and his demons get drunk and they forget to pound some peoples' nails in."
"Well in that case, I'll take Socialist Hell."
"You may make that choice Comrade but I warn you: At the end of the month, all thirty of those nails will be pounded in your ass."
Unforgiving the smallest error? Let's check the market share of IE again...
That statement does have some merit if you are a third-party Windows development house. Windows is MS' own personal playground so they have more latitude to make a hash of things. This isn't true of anything that directly competes with either an MS product or one of the biggies like Adobe and Intuit. The people behind Opera seem to understand this.
Anyone who believes that Apple is really out for browser marketshare in the Windows world just doesn't get it. Safari is on Windows as a tool for iPhone developers, or should I just say web developers, to use standards that will work on the iPhone.
That take on things makes more sense than any other but why the hell is Jobs throwing up little presentation slides that depict an Opera- and Firefox-less world? Is this just a glitch in the circuits that keep him from being affected by his own Reality Distortion Field? Methinks Jobs is annoyed by all the Camino and Firefox users even if iPhone support is the primary motivation for this.
A major reason why I pay for premium channels is so I can watch things like Penn & Teller Bullshit! and Orgazmo. If pay cable has to be just like the three major networks of old then I'm dropping my cable like a hot rock. You hear that cable operators?; I'm not the only one who pays to see things the more public networks can't show. Lobby this one down pronto.
JOE also handles very large files correctly. If I open a 10M logfile with JOE, it is fast because it doesn't seem chuck the entire thing into a buffer. It seems to know how to pull just the bit you're working on from the disk. I'd love a good graphical editor that works this way.
Kubuntu supplies a "simplified" Konqueror that can have further toolbars and suchlike disabled by the user. Although the rendering core isn't EXACTLY like Safari's they're similar enough. The dissimilarity won't grow much because the Konq devs seem to periodically port some good stuff from Webkit back into khtml. Future versions of Konq may well be base on Webkit. What this amounts to is that Ubuntu can offer a very Safari-like experience now.
All that said, I stick to Firefox because there are some extensions I can't live without.
Slashdot Mirror
(I've been releasing open source since before GPL existed, y'see, which is a big part of why I find it so offensive. GPL people seem to believe that the GPL created open source, but there were several vendors selling OSes built on BSD years before Linux had even been thought up.)
This is just too silly to let pass. The people who created the GPL don't have much liking for the term "Open Source" which either 5 minutes on Google or even just this site would tell you (actually I pretty sure you know this which makes it even sillier). Most of the people who created the term "Open Source" have been at loggerheads with the FSF at time or another. Furthermore, users of the GPL aren't a Stallmanite monolith. I use the GPL yet disagree with Stallman on Free Software as a Moral Imperative. Come to think of it, it is the same problem I have with your position as well only substituting the BSD advocate's take on "Freedom" for Stallman's. The only real "Freedom" I see is for developers to use the license of their choice and for derivative developers and users to either take it or leave it. I suppose end-users who don't develop get the most happiness here. They can just use any of the libre licensed stuff and not worry about it.It's funny - people say that, but then they never explain how a business would ever want these restrictions in place. When I ask for an explanation, people usually point out some business they can think up which isn't hurt by these limitations, or point out a GPL company. Well, yay for you. The problem is, in neither of those cases does the GPL actually do good for the company, so that doesn't actually support the claim.
A company can open things up without giving away the store to their more closed competitors. MySQL, Trolltech, and others have a business model made possible by the GPL. You may believe they could get even richer if they did things your way but it seems they are actually businessmen too and that they like you seem to know what they are doing. Others like IBM can make improvements to useful codebases without again handing free gifts to their competitors. A competitor can make use of the code but only with the reciprocity the GPL enforces. There are valid choices other than the total giveaway of BSD/MIT and the anal retentiveness of an MS EULA. I've always found it interesting that hardcore BSD advocates find both of those utterly acceptable yet the GPL and other copyleft is utter anathema.That doesn't mean I can't explain why I disagree with it. Please stop putting words into my mouth. All I said was that the limitations that the GPL imposes have significant costs to projects which use it, and that I find the ramifications thereof sad. At no point did I say any of the things you just attempted to shame me for.
I've put no words in your mouth. You said: "I believe GPLv3 is GPL's swan song, and I can't be happier that it's going away. It's time for people who write open source to stop closing it." That is what prompted me to say "The GPL isn't going to go away just because you and your company doesn't like it." You expressed a very clear sentiment and got a very clear answer. Now I wasn't insinuating that you oppose license choice in others but you yourself are trying to "shame" others for using a license you disagree with. Those others you disagree with seem to see costs in BSD/MIT style licensing as well: you yourself may be a good citizen in contributing back to BSD projects. Others aren't. I understand that most BSD advocates find this acceptable. I don't have a problem with that either; I DO have a problem someone telling me I'm obligated to either use a free-for-all license for my code or to use a proprietary license for my code and that any other compromise is a moral failing of some kind. It isn't a one size fits all world. The GPL has been and will continue to be used and those using it are in no way misguided: it is the best way for them to achieve their goals. I'll allow that you may dislike their goals but those goals are no worse than proprietary software (which I'm also OK with).I fully support you and your company's right to release under whatever license you like. But the GPL in both v2 and v3 trim isn't going to just go away because you and your company don't like it. I agree that the BSD and MIT licenses are more suitable for some purposes. Nonetheless the GPL (both forms) are also more suitable for some purposes and many of those are business purposes. The reality is that GPL code for all intents and purposes isn't available for those of your frame of mind to use; it isn't the end of world and no amount of sour grapes will change the fact that developers with other goals have just as much right to use the GPL as you have to use proprietary and BSD code.
That wouldn't be the effect of this. The best case scenario for the FSF is that someone redeems one of the MS vouchers for a version of Novell's Linux that contains GPLv3 code. Once this happens, MS will have a harder time enforcing patents that cover said code since defendents can cite GPLv3 terms as a defense. I'm not convinced that theory is legally sound but in any case, forcing MS to open code is NOT the goal here. The goal is use the conjunction of the GPLv3 and Novell's contract with MS to defang a large portion of the MS patent portfolio.
Novell could just decide to "take one for the team" and not honor the coupons. They would then be in a legal pickle with that customer but that is a better place to be than being sued by either MS or the FSF. GPLv3 is going to put Novell in more trouble than MS. The combination of GPLv3 and these vouchers is going to hurt either MS, Novell, or both. MS Legal will do everything they can to be sure Novell takes all the hits.
I suspect that in the end, GPLv3 won't have any effect on MS patents at all; it will eventually cause breaches of contacts between Novell and MS and between both companies and voucher holders.
I, in fact, have a paid for copy of Parallels 3. I will be asking for my copies of the LGPLed sources and will forward to the Wine project all correspondence received. Since I will be far from the only person doing this, I believe that the Wine project will be well within their rights as the copyright holders to insist on compliance.
you can just opt out of the Internet entirely and carry on running Linux or .*BSD or whatever.
You yourself have just shown that the EFF, FSF, and security experts have a genuine beef. Using Mickeysoft or "opting out of the Internet" is not an acceptable choice.It isn't in the license by default. It is a restriction that can be added; this was done for compatibility with the Affero GPL.
My last XP install was on a Toshiba laptop with a SATA chipset. It was a VERY difficult install. The installer required a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it to find the hard drive and proceed further. So I googled around, made the floppy (an odyssey in and of itself), and dragged out a USB floppy drive. I popped in the disk, the installer loaded the driver and I was able to format the drive. All seemed well until the copy files stage was hit and I was prompted to insert the SATA driver disk again. No matter what I did, it would not find the drivers. It turned out that the USB floppy driver included in the XP installer will only work properly with certain USB floppy chipsets that were out in the 2001 timeframe (quite the Google quest for THAT little nugget). I had to hit the boneyard for a really old USB floppy drive I had laying around. THAT finally gave me everything I needed to finish the basic install. I also had to track down and install 120 odd MB of drivers to get rid of all the yellow ! in the Device Manager once the basic install was completed. What was really fun about that is that Toshiba's driver page for the machine didn't have the Bluetooth software and couple of minor chipset items. So I had yet another Google Odyssey for that.......
This install of XP was every bit as fiendish as a seven year old version of Slackware if not more so. If I were feeling sadistic, I'd cheerfully hand this thing and the newer USB floppy drive to anyone who spouts "Linux is hard to install." with none of the background information. Yeah yeah, I know, I know, Vista will make all of this all better (Biggest Lie #7: The latest version will solve all your problems.)
I'll throw in another nugget: I always defrag as soon as I have a complete driver install+MS patches+Application Patches. The amount of red in the defrag analysis at that point is pretty amazing.
http://www.campchaos.com/blog-archives/2006/05/nap ster_bad_good_or_goblin.html
When fitness criteria are set in nature, the presence of a designer then becomes the thing you would have to design experiments or make predictions for. When fitness criteria are set in a lab, all we are demonstrating is that biological systems can adapt to them. If we select fitness criteria that come up in natural settings then we can experimentally verify adaptations seen in nature (neato). If one posits an Intelligent Designer, then you'll need a different sort of experiment to test for that. That fitness criteria are responded to isn't the point of contention. That they are set by an outside agency is. In a lab, we know that we are setting criteria. That is the point of experimentation after all. But it is a stretch to say that because we see things in nature that we see in a lab that all of nature must therefore be an experiment.
A further point, when we select fitness criteria in a lab we don't necessarily know what adaptations will take place. The results often don't look very designed (perhaps "engineered" is a better word) at all. For instance, experiments have been done with FPGA's to "evolve" things like working oscillators and radio receivers. Working results have used things like capacitive coupling between parts of the FPGA not usually meant to be directly connected in any fashion. What's more, when such "designs" are burned into identical model FPGA's they don't work because the internal tolerances differ. However both FPGA's would work fine for the sort of engineered circuits they are actually designed for.
Konqueror 3.5.6 Results:
From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)
This release of Konqueror has been their stable release since last January was supplanted by 3.5.7 last week. So Opera isn't the first. A stable released browser has been able to pass this test for at least 6 months. I don't know how 3.5.5 and before would have done on it.
All that said, Firefox tends to do better with the javascript heavy sites and has extensions I can't live without. If I were going to use something else it would probably be Konq though. When KDE4 comes out, Konq will be easily installed on Windows and OS X. That might get a bit more momentum behind it.
http://www.campchaos.com/blog-archives/old_cartoon s/napster_bad/
I didn't think a plane like the SR-71 would do much in the way of evading. They have to fly a particular route to photograph the site of interest. The whole idea was to fly so high and so fast that no gun, missile, or interceptor could match it. That proposition got increasingly dicier as satellites got better. The AI just has to goose the throttle maybe?
MS is going to lose a lot of their market share in the next few years, with Linux picking up most of the server business, and the Mac getting the desktops and laptops.
I'd like to think so but although your statement has some merit, it isn't a slam dunk. I'll reword it to fit reality:MS is going to lose some of their market share in the next few years, with Linux picking up a bit more of the server business, and the Mac getting a few more desktops and laptops.
The wins that Mac and Linux(OpenSolaris?) can expect from dissatisfaction with Vista tend to be a bit inflated by fans of other OSes IMHO. New machines will be beefy enough to bury most of the performance hit and a service pack or two will fix the most glaring issues. It will take longer than MS wants but in 3-5 years most machines will be on Vista. The plus side is Linux and Mac will be stronger for it just not as strong as the advocates for those would like.
This is a joke that used to be told in Russia at least through the Seventies:
A man dies and his spirit appears before the Afterlife Commissar. "Your qualifications are such that you will not be permitted to enter Socialist Heaven. You may choose to go to either Capitalist Hell or Socialist Hell."
"What's the difference Comrade Commissar?"
"In Capitalist Hell, the Devil and his cadre of demons are ruthlessly efficient and will pound one nail in your ass each and every day. In Socialist Hell, the Devil and his demons get drunk and they forget to pound some peoples' nails in."
"Well in that case, I'll take Socialist Hell."
"You may make that choice Comrade but I warn you: At the end of the month, all thirty of those nails will be pounded in your ass."
Unforgiving the smallest error? Let's check the market share of IE again ...
That statement does have some merit if you are a third-party Windows development house. Windows is MS' own personal playground so they have more latitude to make a hash of things. This isn't true of anything that directly competes with either an MS product or one of the biggies like Adobe and Intuit. The people behind Opera seem to understand this.Anyone who believes that Apple is really out for browser marketshare in the Windows world just doesn't get it. Safari is on Windows as a tool for iPhone developers, or should I just say web developers, to use standards that will work on the iPhone.
That take on things makes more sense than any other but why the hell is Jobs throwing up little presentation slides that depict an Opera- and Firefox-less world? Is this just a glitch in the circuits that keep him from being affected by his own Reality Distortion Field? Methinks Jobs is annoyed by all the Camino and Firefox users even if iPhone support is the primary motivation for this.A major reason why I pay for premium channels is so I can watch things like Penn & Teller Bullshit! and Orgazmo. If pay cable has to be just like the three major networks of old then I'm dropping my cable like a hot rock. You hear that cable operators?; I'm not the only one who pays to see things the more public networks can't show. Lobby this one down pronto.
But no one is going to want to make the necessary level of changes until Folrida and Calcutta are under water.
I knew there was a silver lining to all this doom and gloom somewhere.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPRxx2r61iA
JOE also handles very large files correctly. If I open a 10M logfile with JOE, it is fast because it doesn't seem chuck the entire thing into a buffer. It seems to know how to pull just the bit you're working on from the disk. I'd love a good graphical editor that works this way.
http://kazehakase.sourceforge.jp/20031201.html
It can use almost every html rendering engine available to Linux. w3m, khtml, gecko, etc.
Kubuntu supplies a "simplified" Konqueror that can have further toolbars and suchlike disabled by the user. Although the rendering core isn't EXACTLY like Safari's they're similar enough. The dissimilarity won't grow much because the Konq devs seem to periodically port some good stuff from Webkit back into khtml. Future versions of Konq may well be base on Webkit. What this amounts to is that Ubuntu can offer a very Safari-like experience now.
All that said, I stick to Firefox because there are some extensions I can't live without.
Nah, He was just trying to write a chess program.