I disagree with the second half of your first sentence. Yes, "racism is a problem." But as far as I can tell, "we want to protect the public" means, "we want to use law -- the threat of violence -- to forbid people from expressing hurtful opinions." The cure is worse than the disease!
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I don't agree that the cure is worse than the disease.[1]
The disease is that innocent people are getting hurt or killed.
How about saying that the common ground is, "Racism is a problem, but we're committed to maintaining individual freedom of opinion and expression. Let's have a dialog on how to fight racism within that framework"?
The point is to get everyone at the table, share experiences and understand everyone's perspective. Then we can begin to work on the solution, whatever that solution is.
[1] You can search my past/. comments or Google me to find my stance on free speech, free software, etc.
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts. It's not illegal to hate someone because of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, height, weight or operating system, but when it moves into "You should kill this group.", then it's not just a thought, it's something serious, and dangerous.
I agree that it's sometimes great to let the nutcases say their peice in public in order to ridicule them, but we also have to protect people from violent acts by these nutcases. It's obviously a fine line- the UK (and most of Europe)'s rules differ quite a bit from those in the US.
I think the common ground here which we can all agree on is that racism is a problem, and that we want to protect the public. From there, we can have a dialog on how to best accomplish it while maintaining individual civil liberties.
Actually, it's now a decision the author can use or not use.
It's one of the possible restrictions that can be optionally added which applies to public use of the software requiring distribution of the modified source.
RMS has said in speeches that both arguments held weight for him and so he decided to leave it up to the software developer and leave the default behavior to the way things currently are.
It may be desirable for students to Creative Commons thier work, thereby explicly excercising copyright over the material as well as the ways it can be used. The Academic Commons project uses Creative Commons, and I would think that a progressive university would be in favor of this. A CC licnese that would prevent non-commercial use would prohibit websites like Turnitin.com from being able to use the material, but also prevent students from using the material without explicit attribution to the original author.
There was an episode of Futurama where they combatted global warming by putting a giant ice cube in the ocean. As global warming became worse, they would use a bigger ice cube each year.
This plan seems to have the same sort of thinking behind it.
There are several reasons why by itself won't work...
First, you're going to first need to remove any and all debconf options during install/update time. Additionally, if there are any packages left that don't use debconf, those will also need to be removed (I don't think there are anymore but I don't know for sure).
Secondly, you're assuming that the configuration files for all the packages is perfect for the appliance. I doubt it.
Thirdly, if I were a small startup company, I might want to think long and hard about which distribution I used. While Debian is great, an appliance like this needs to last a long time in the field. One of the problems with Debian is that policy demands they only support the OS until a new stable is declared.
This may mean a need to do full upgrades on live or semi-live boxes...
I don't work for them and haven't used their product much, but there's a company called R-Path (founded by former Red Hat early employees) that seems like its designed for "appliances" just like yours.
The idea is that you build your platform on thier system, then you add your programs on top. The system merges updates from them and your system and places it onto the target system. The system they've built is called Conary. Conary itself is Free Software, but RPath sells services along with it that seem attractive.
It looks very well put together and if I were looking at building an appliance, it's certainly something I'd be considering.
I think that what you should ask yourself is, what is the objective of your class and how does your teaching style work with that objective.
It's my understanding that your objective in teaching the class is give your students the information about the class. Of course if it were that easy, we wouldn't need professors at all, and we could rely on books.
A class professor will go beyond the text. He (or she) assumes that the students have already read the material and can then summarize the lessons as well as provide guidance and insight into the lessons. When I was in school (about ten years ago), it wasn't uncommon for professors to offer class notes in the form of printouts of slides that were presented in class. I found this to be very helpful, allowing me to focus on the lecture itself more than structuring my notes. I'd still take notes, but they would be in conjunction with the class slides.
Having a podcast of the class would take the conveince to another step and make it possible for students to have access to the lecture itself after class. I know that some students have recorded lectures to review later. Having a podcast of a class seems like a great way to offer this without the student needing to do the work of recording, just as the slides made it more convenient to take notes in class. Some professors felt that note-taking was an important skill, and that offering the slides would make it "too easy", but I fail to see what this has to do with the objective of teaching the class the material.
As for the issue of class attendance- is class attendance a requirement for the course? If so, it should be made clear in the course material. If you take attendance and students fail to show up, then the podcasts don't matter.
Other have pointed out that MIT and other schools are presenting all class material online. This serves lots of purposes, but I think that we can all agree that there is more to a class than just the books and study material, even if it includes the recorded lectures.
What Red Hat did was more than just protecting against modifications. It used to be that you could get a byte-for-byte exact copy of a Red Hat CD for a buck. Red Hat put a stop to that. They also put additional restrictions on their "Enterprise" Linux. Customers were no longer allowed to install it on as many machines as they wanted. They were not allowed to copy the CD freely.
The first and second issue you presented are not the same, nor enforced by the same mechanism.
Selling Red Hat CDs was a trademark issue, and actually made sense for them. This was a trademark issue, pure and simple.
The issue of customer's ability to freelly install it is another one altogether. They are 100% able to install any and all Free Software wherever they like. What they can't do is use any of that software with any Red Hat service.
There's no trademark issue if all you want to do is make an exact copy of the software, because the product is not being misrepresented.
Sure there is. I can't repackage someone else's work and sell it under their brand.
What is "reasonable"? Entangling your trademark in a 100 different places which must be changed is a good way to discourage modifications. Not defining "reasonable" is just asking for trouble.
This is from a draft, not a finalized license.
Anyway this conversaiton's run its course. It was fun though:)
Since when do you have to modify GPL software to remove trademarks to redistribute it?
This is a tricky issue, when you think about it.
Let's put Red Hat aside and think of someone else. Let's say that I wrote a program and I GPLed it. People use it, and like it, and I keep releasing it. Then I make a trademark, "Blue Advark Software". If you see the blue advark, you know it's me, and you know it's the software I made.
If the software is GPLed, then anyone can go and redistribute the software, but if they also copy my trademark, then two things happen. The first thing is that people can become confused about which releases are mine, and which are modifications. That's an important distrinction sometimes.
The second is that if I'm not shown to be enforcing my trademark, it can be taken away from me.
It's understandable that Red Hat would be hawkish about it's trademark.
So it's legally compatible with GPL, but the other side of your question seemed to be "Is it in the spirit of the GPL?"
The answer to that is mostly yes.
To understand this, you want to go back to why the GPL exists. The GPL exists in order to help spread Free Software, which is a form of knowledge. The right to redistribute doesn't necessarily include the right to redistribute the trademark.
Red Hat isn't the only one concerned about this, and I believe that trademark issues are being dealt with as an optional restriction in the GPL3 drafts.
Selling support wasn't enough for Red Hat, so they basically ignored the GPL and created an "Enterprise" Linux that couldn't be freely copied because of trademark poisoning.
That simply isn't true though...
The GPL prevents that. CentOS and other exist, which are essentially Red Hat.
Wrong. That is only the extremists who thinks that. (And the really extreme is trying to enforce it. Lucky for us, they don't use bombs.)
There are may kind of software that works best when it is not FOSS. Some software simply won't exist as such.
A person squarely in the Free Software camp sees the issue as a moral one, so to/not/ believe that all software should be Free would be a bit like saying "Yes, it's okay to have just a little slavery."- it doesn't make logical sense.
Your use of the term FOSS indicates to me that you're probably not squarely in the Free Software camp.
Personally I'm totally into FOSS. At home I use as much of my software as possible is FOSS, except if there is some non-FOSS that is better (all things considered, and from my point of view).
Again, this is not a matter of just software, but about the work involved in creating it.
But I spend my whole day (dayjob) creating non-FOSS software. It's not even costless. And I can't imagine it work in any other way.
Well, if you're one of the majority of software developers that develops in-house software, nothing would change whatsoever. If you write software for distribution, likely very little would change, since you could still charge for support, which is mainly what companies are interested in.
By the way, we have the same FOSS policy at work as I have at home, except most departments doesn't value the freedom-part quite as high as I do. But we do have a long list of FOSS software that is approved for use, and I guess an occasional bug-report or even a patch is returned, but most of our changes in the FOSS is just for adapting it to our systems.
It's true that most management folk don't appreciate the issue of Freedom. Some are starting to. I think for the management-types, it's a matter of what they understand. A programmer understands code, we understand being able to fix and tune and customize. A buisnessperson understands companies and contracts. It's what they deal with all the time, and what they're comfortable dealing with. That doesn't mean they don't appreciate the freedom, they just don't know it yet.
I resent the notion that I'm simply trying to "steal just a little bit". My point, which you obviously missed, remains that you either have to subscribe to it 100% to participate in any way.
Your feelings of resentment aside, the idea that you would use code that, I wrote in a way that I don't intend is wrong. Stealing is a loaded word, but it sure is freeloading.
If I take a piece of code, make it better, return that change to the OSS community, I still can't use it in my software without make it GPL as well. So now that leaves ME at a disadvantage because there is no proportionality to the give and take. Because of that, I just avoid that game all together. At least the LGPL offers a more reasonable solution, in that sense. Sadly, it has the stigma of GPL with it. This ALL or NONE of GPL makes it more cult-like than many are comfortable with.
If that's what the original creator intended, then they (the author) and you have two choices.
The first choice is that the original author may use another license than the GPL. If it's software where they want this sort of arangement, they might use the Lesser General Public License (the LGPL), which is designed exactly for the sort of thing you're pointing out.
Or, if this is really important to you, you could go to the developer and propose to make you a special licensed version of the program, just for you. I'm a Free Software developer (though not a prolific one) and if you said you wanted to use my code in a proprietary project, but that you agreed to improve anything directly related to it, I'm sure you and I could come to an arangement that would involve this contract in writing and compensation (which would allow me to write more Free Software).
I can't speak for everyone, but I think many folks would find this aragement acceptable.
The fact that the "myths" are trying to be discounted shows that the GPL community wants to go mainstream, but like a certain political party, it feels that the idea of bringing the two groups together is for the other side to simply join them where they stand.
Without getting too much into actual politics here, compromise is one way of trying to gain acceptance of an idea. The other is to hold one's ground and wait for people to come around to your ideas. If you look at how much ground the Free Software community has gained in the last 20 years, I think it's hard to deny that this method, though slow, is working.
Your answer is way too simplistic and doesn't address the issue at all. It works great if you live in one world (OSS) or the other. This comes from what is appears to be the common belief that ALL software should be OSS. As long as you believe that to be the case, your answer seems appropriate because you have decided to live in only one world.
The perspective of those of us in the Free Software community is that all software should be Free Software.
Unfortunately -- that is not very reflective of reality. That approach keeps people away from OSS because it's effectively an ALL OR NONE proposition for them. They either buy into the idea that everything should be OSS, or they stay away.
It may keep some small number of developers away, but if they're only interested in using our code against us, I don't see how this is harmful.
I avoid engaging in any OSS projects for that very reason. If you want to the benefits of others works, there is a cost associated with it. GPL just makes that cost your software where Proprietary Software usually has some fixed cost associated with it (ie the cost of the software). GPL is definitely not free.
If by free, you mean lawlessness, then you're correct. As a society, we live with rules. The GPL says "If you want to work with us, here are the rules you have to follow.". Proprietary software also has rules, rules like "You must pay us money." and "You must sign this non-disclosure agreement about what you see." and "You must sign this non-compete clause."
I still believe that GPL is viral in nature because there is no proportionality associated with it. If you apply a small set of code to an existing open program, I can understand the requirement to keep it open. But if I were to take a program the size of OpenOffice and use a couple interesting chunks of code, I'm technically in the same situation. So whether the GPL code contributes
This gets back to the original point, which is that the GPL is designed to help create a library of Free code that can be used by any Free Software developer. You're saying "I can't steal just a little bit." and indeed, you're right, you can't, by design. You also can't mix that proprietary code into Free code.
I know the immediate response to that is "then don't use it, you have a choice" -- which is what I do, but it doesn't change viral nature. Version 3 of the license doesn't seem to address this issue and it is one of the big reasons why anyone thinking of using any GPL code needs to think about it carefully because it remains an ALL or NONE proposition. To me, that's what makes it viral in nature.
Fiften, or even ten years ago, people with that perspective may have been able to be convincing, and they argued for the BSD license. There are plenty of people in the BSD community would agree with you, and find that the GPL is too restrictive for them. If that's what they, and you, believe, then you have all the rights to go ahead and use what you feel is a more appropriate license for your work. But since then, in the ~20 years of the GPL, there is now far more code available under it than under the BSD license, including code from buisnesses.
I think a major reason for that is the exact reason that you've pointed out as a "viral" quality- that is that with the GPL, no one can get a leg up on the original developer. It's "Come and join us." or "Sorry, we can't help you.". If Sun had a license which allowed you to as you wanted with OpenOffice.Org, then they'd be at a disadvantage against you.
It's a shame that you don't use our work and contribute to the community, but that's your choice.
No, he doesn't. He actually mentiones military use as something he says that the GPL must support, since we want the best software working for our military, we'd hope they'd use GNU. He says this specificallly in a GPL3 talk.
What he says there is that the license may be legally valid.
The person whose saying he agrees with their goals is the OSI person, Russ Nelson, not RMS.
Free Software must be Free Software for any use. It's a similar argument against commercial use, it's morally unacceptable to prevent anyone from using the software, commercially or militarily, or used in a classroom or by an individual.
My take is that the initial reads should be practical, then slowly they should move into theory.
Therefore my first pick is the book that got me started:
Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (first edition)
It's a very pragmatic guide to learning the Unix command shell and system layout.
My second pick is Think Unix by Jon Lasser, which covers using Unix systems but also gives a bit of background and teaches the lesson on how to learn.
Lastly, to go into the pure theory, Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming is a wonderful guide on explaining *why* things are the way they are in Unix (and by extension, GNU/Linux).
I don't see this as a real problem for a variety of reasons.
First, as many have pointed out Java is a trademark that Sun owns. They can control it. I can't fork Java and call it Java. I could maybe fork it and call it "Half-Skim Soy Latte" but that's not Java.
Considering how many Java alternatives there are already, I don't see it getting worse.
But there are plenty of languages with an official version other spinoffs. Perl and Python both have an official version and then spinoffs.
I remember hearing about two or three weeks ago that Sun said it was committed to "Open Sourcing all of its software, everything they make."- this is from LugRadio and a Sun representative.
Given this/very/ progressive stance, I don't see why they're stalling when it comes to Java.
If anything, this slows Java adoption.
Java was all the rage in the late 90s. Had they made it Free, I think it would have been a tour de force. Now we see competition from simpler technologies. We're learning that we don't need a J2EE infrastructure when a simple Model-View-Controller model with a database backend will do the job just as well, and so on.
Freeing Java would spread adoption, if nothing else than by including it in every distribution shortly thereafter.
This new license system isn't good enough, it'll just frustrate people.
It's a buisness decision and it's about core competancy.
Oracle is a software development company. They have decidated staff who develop and support a core set of products.
When looking at a new product line like "Oracle Linux"- they'll need to spend resources on it. Resources will include developers, project managers, physical space, computers, the whole thing. If they use existing staff, they'll have to be retrained in a new area of development. And it's all untested- essentially a crap shoot as to whether or not it will all work out.
Buying another company solves all the resource problems, and Suse has a track record of success. It's a safer bet.
Sorry AC, but at work, we purchased a bunch of "N" series workstations, and they all came with FreeDOS. I don't know what Dell does for all their products, but that's what they did in our case.
As for "Stop spreading misinformation."- it's my experience, and it makes sense for them to do that for reasons mentioned in the story.
I have several of the disks and license agreements since I thought it was neat that they went through the effort of burning professional CDs and making a printed copy of the GPL to go along with the computer.
Besides the other poster's insightful comment about BIOS updates, you also want to remember that Dell sells various distributions as add-ons that they charge for. They don't want to compete with themselves.
Most of the other Free OSes either compete with the product they're selling, or aren't ready for mass use yet (sorry Syllable).
I agree, and am going to expand on the parent poster's point.
Buzzwords like "Web 2.0" are, for the most part, nonesense. Sometimes vendors have come up with terms for things that already exist, like NAS instead of NFS. Sometimes these words are meaningless, and you should try to resist them by focusing your energy on what/your/ boss cares about, the buisness.
And that gets me to the second point, which is what the parent said, "delieverable" isn't a buzzword. It's jargon. Specifically, it's buisness jargon, the language of those you're now working with. Other words like "opportunity" may be there to foster a specific kind of thinking. You could be cynical and think that it's all nonesense, or you could get what you can from it and try to use it.
The most important thing to remember is that neither is important- what's important is providing the information your boss needs in the form that's best for him/her. At the end of the day, whether you use plain English, technical jargon or buisness jargon, it doesn't matter- your objective isn't to "make a point" so much as get your job done. You were promoted and placed in a position with a new set of challenges, specifically working wiith new people, people who aren't on the same wavelength as you in terms of language. Consider it a learning experience, wether or not you agree with it, and I'm sure you'll find a way to express yourself and provide value in your new role. It's good to see system administrators being seen as valuable enough to be promoted- it's a rare event.
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I disagree with the second half of your first sentence. Yes, "racism is a problem." But as far as I can tell, "we want to protect the public" means, "we want to use law -- the threat of violence -- to forbid people from expressing hurtful opinions." The cure is worse than the disease!
/. comments or Google me to find my stance on free speech, free software, etc.
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I don't agree that the cure is worse than the disease.[1]
The disease is that innocent people are getting hurt or killed.
How about saying that the common ground is, "Racism is a problem, but we're committed to maintaining individual freedom of opinion and expression. Let's have a dialog on how to fight racism within that framework"?
The point is to get everyone at the table, share experiences and understand everyone's perspective. Then we can begin to work on the solution, whatever that solution is.
[1] You can search my past
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts. It's not illegal to hate someone because of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, height, weight or operating system, but when it moves into "You should kill this group.", then it's not just a thought, it's something serious, and dangerous.
I agree that it's sometimes great to let the nutcases say their peice in public in order to ridicule them, but we also have to protect people from violent acts by these nutcases. It's obviously a fine line- the UK (and most of Europe)'s rules differ quite a bit from those in the US.
I think the common ground here which we can all agree on is that racism is a problem, and that we want to protect the public. From there, we can have a dialog on how to best accomplish it while maintaining individual civil liberties.
Actually, it's now a decision the author can use or not use.
It's one of the possible restrictions that can be optionally added which applies to public use of the software requiring distribution of the modified source.
RMS has said in speeches that both arguments held weight for him and so he decided to leave it up to the software developer and leave the default behavior to the way things currently are.
It may be desirable for students to Creative Commons thier work, thereby explicly excercising copyright over the material as well as the ways it can be used. The Academic Commons project uses Creative Commons, and I would think that a progressive university would be in favor of this. A CC licnese that would prevent non-commercial use would prohibit websites like Turnitin.com from being able to use the material, but also prevent students from using the material without explicit attribution to the original author.
I think that a policy that's not publicized is not a policy, and would be thrown out of court.
A policy of that sort would be a contract. If there's no notification of the policy, there's no meeting of the minds, and therefore no contract.
There was an episode of Futurama where they combatted global warming by putting a giant ice cube in the ocean. As global warming became worse, they would use a bigger ice cube each year.
This plan seems to have the same sort of thinking behind it.
There are several reasons why by itself won't work...
First, you're going to first need to remove any and all debconf options during install/update time. Additionally, if there are any packages left that don't use debconf, those will also need to be removed (I don't think there are anymore but I don't know for sure).
Secondly, you're assuming that the configuration files for all the packages is perfect for the appliance. I doubt it.
Thirdly, if I were a small startup company, I might want to think long and hard about which distribution I used. While Debian is great, an appliance like this needs to last a long time in the field. One of the problems with Debian is that policy demands they only support the OS until a new stable is declared.
This may mean a need to do full upgrades on live or semi-live boxes...
I don't work for them and haven't used their product much, but there's a company called R-Path (founded by former Red Hat early employees) that seems like its designed for "appliances" just like yours.
The idea is that you build your platform on thier system, then you add your programs on top. The system merges updates from them and your system and places it onto the target system. The system they've built is called Conary. Conary itself is Free Software, but RPath sells services along with it that seem attractive.
It looks very well put together and if I were looking at building an appliance, it's certainly something I'd be considering.
http://www.rpath.com
I think that what you should ask yourself is, what is the objective of your class and how does your teaching style work with that objective.
It's my understanding that your objective in teaching the class is give your students the information about the class. Of course if it were that easy, we wouldn't need professors at all, and we could rely on books.
A class professor will go beyond the text. He (or she) assumes that the students have already read the material and can then summarize the lessons as well as provide guidance and insight into the lessons. When I was in school (about ten years ago), it wasn't uncommon for professors to offer class notes in the form of printouts of slides that were presented in class. I found this to be very helpful, allowing me to focus on the lecture itself more than structuring my notes. I'd still take notes, but they would be in conjunction with the class slides.
Having a podcast of the class would take the conveince to another step and make it possible for students to have access to the lecture itself after class. I know that some students have recorded lectures to review later. Having a podcast of a class seems like a great way to offer this without the student needing to do the work of recording, just as the slides made it more convenient to take notes in class. Some professors felt that note-taking was an important skill, and that offering the slides would make it "too easy", but I fail to see what this has to do with the objective of teaching the class the material.
As for the issue of class attendance- is class attendance a requirement for the course? If so, it should be made clear in the course material. If you take attendance and students fail to show up, then the podcasts don't matter.
Other have pointed out that MIT and other schools are presenting all class material online. This serves lots of purposes, but I think that we can all agree that there is more to a class than just the books and study material, even if it includes the recorded lectures.
What Red Hat did was more than just protecting against modifications. It used to be that you could get a byte-for-byte exact copy of a Red Hat CD for a buck. Red Hat put a stop to that. They also put additional restrictions on their "Enterprise" Linux. Customers were no longer allowed to install it on as many machines as they wanted. They were not allowed to copy the CD freely.
:)
The first and second issue you presented are not the same, nor enforced by the same mechanism.
Selling Red Hat CDs was a trademark issue, and actually made sense for them. This was a trademark issue, pure and simple.
The issue of customer's ability to freelly install it is another one altogether. They are 100% able to install any and all Free Software wherever they like. What they can't do is use any of that software with any Red Hat service.
There's no trademark issue if all you want to do is make an exact copy of the software, because the product is not being misrepresented.
Sure there is. I can't repackage someone else's work and sell it under their brand.
What is "reasonable"? Entangling your trademark in a 100 different places which must be changed is a good way to discourage modifications. Not defining "reasonable" is just asking for trouble.
This is from a draft, not a finalized license.
Anyway this conversaiton's run its course. It was fun though
Since when do you have to modify GPL software to remove trademarks to redistribute it?
This is a tricky issue, when you think about it.
Let's put Red Hat aside and think of someone else. Let's say that I wrote a program and I GPLed it. People use it, and like it, and I keep releasing it. Then I make a trademark, "Blue Advark Software". If you see the blue advark, you know it's me, and you know it's the software I made.
If the software is GPLed, then anyone can go and redistribute the software, but if they also copy my trademark, then two things happen. The first thing is that people can become confused about which releases are mine, and which are modifications. That's an important distrinction sometimes.
The second is that if I'm not shown to be enforcing my trademark, it can be taken away from me.
It's understandable that Red Hat would be hawkish about it's trademark.
So it's legally compatible with GPL, but the other side of your question seemed to be "Is it in the spirit of the GPL?"
The answer to that is mostly yes.
To understand this, you want to go back to why the GPL exists. The GPL exists in order to help spread Free Software, which is a form of knowledge. The right to redistribute doesn't necessarily include the right to redistribute the trademark.
Red Hat isn't the only one concerned about this, and I believe that trademark issues are being dealt with as an optional restriction in the GPL3 drafts.
I hope that clarifies things for you.
Selling support wasn't enough for Red Hat, so they basically ignored the GPL and created an "Enterprise" Linux that couldn't be freely copied because of trademark poisoning.
That simply isn't true though...
The GPL prevents that. CentOS and other exist, which are essentially Red Hat.
Wrong. That is only the extremists who thinks that. (And the really extreme is trying to enforce it. Lucky for us, they don't use bombs.)
/not/ believe that all software should be Free would be a bit like saying "Yes, it's okay to have just a little slavery."- it doesn't make logical sense.
.
There are may kind of software that works best when it is not FOSS. Some software simply won't exist as such.
A person squarely in the Free Software camp sees the issue as a moral one, so to
Your use of the term FOSS indicates to me that you're probably not squarely in the Free Software camp.
Personally I'm totally into FOSS. At home I use as much of my software as possible is FOSS, except if there is some non-FOSS that is better (all things considered, and from my point of view)
Again, this is not a matter of just software, but about the work involved in creating it.
But I spend my whole day (dayjob) creating non-FOSS software. It's not even costless. And I can't imagine it work in any other way.
Well, if you're one of the majority of software developers that develops in-house software, nothing would change whatsoever. If you write software for distribution, likely very little would change, since you could still charge for support, which is mainly what companies are interested in.
By the way, we have the same FOSS policy at work as I have at home, except most departments doesn't value the freedom-part quite as high as I do. But we do have a long list of FOSS software that is approved for use, and I guess an occasional bug-report or even a patch is returned, but most of our changes in the FOSS is just for adapting it to our systems.
It's true that most management folk don't appreciate the issue of Freedom. Some are starting to. I think for the management-types, it's a matter of what they understand. A programmer understands code, we understand being able to fix and tune and customize. A buisnessperson understands companies and contracts. It's what they deal with all the time, and what they're comfortable dealing with. That doesn't mean they don't appreciate the freedom, they just don't know it yet.
I resent the notion that I'm simply trying to "steal just a little bit". My point, which you obviously missed, remains that you either have to subscribe to it 100% to participate in any way.
Your feelings of resentment aside, the idea that you would use code that, I wrote in a way that I don't intend is wrong. Stealing is a loaded word, but it sure is freeloading.
If I take a piece of code, make it better, return that change to the OSS community, I still can't use it in my software without make it GPL as well. So now that leaves ME at a disadvantage because there is no proportionality to the give and take. Because of that, I just avoid that game all together. At least the LGPL offers a more reasonable solution, in that sense. Sadly, it has the stigma of GPL with it. This ALL or NONE of GPL makes it more cult-like than many are comfortable with.
If that's what the original creator intended, then they (the author) and you have two choices.
The first choice is that the original author may use another license than the GPL. If it's software where they want this sort of arangement, they might use the Lesser General Public License (the LGPL), which is designed exactly for the sort of thing you're pointing out.
Or, if this is really important to you, you could go to the developer and propose to make you a special licensed version of the program, just for you. I'm a Free Software developer (though not a prolific one) and if you said you wanted to use my code in a proprietary project, but that you agreed to improve anything directly related to it, I'm sure you and I could come to an arangement that would involve this contract in writing and compensation (which would allow me to write more Free Software).
I can't speak for everyone, but I think many folks would find this aragement acceptable.
The fact that the "myths" are trying to be discounted shows that the GPL community wants to go mainstream, but like a certain political party, it feels that the idea of bringing the two groups together is for the other side to simply join them where they stand.
Without getting too much into actual politics here, compromise is one way of trying to gain acceptance of an idea. The other is to hold one's ground and wait for people to come around to your ideas. If you look at how much ground the Free Software community has gained in the last 20 years, I think it's hard to deny that this method, though slow, is working.
Your answer is way too simplistic and doesn't address the issue at all. It works great if you live in one world (OSS) or the other. This comes from what is appears to be the common belief that ALL software should be OSS. As long as you believe that to be the case, your answer seems appropriate because you have decided to live in only one world.
The perspective of those of us in the Free Software community is that all software should be Free Software.
Unfortunately -- that is not very reflective of reality. That approach keeps people away from OSS because it's effectively an ALL OR NONE proposition for them. They either buy into the idea that everything should be OSS, or they stay away.
It may keep some small number of developers away, but if they're only interested in using our code against us, I don't see how this is harmful.
I avoid engaging in any OSS projects for that very reason. If you want to the benefits of others works, there is a cost associated with it. GPL just makes that cost your software where Proprietary Software usually has some fixed cost associated with it (ie the cost of the software). GPL is definitely not free.
If by free, you mean lawlessness, then you're correct. As a society, we live with rules. The GPL says "If you want to work with us, here are the rules you have to follow.". Proprietary software also has rules, rules like "You must pay us money." and "You must sign this non-disclosure agreement about what you see." and "You must sign this non-compete clause."
I still believe that GPL is viral in nature because there is no proportionality associated with it. If you apply a small set of code to an existing open program, I can understand the requirement to keep it open. But if I were to take a program the size of OpenOffice and use a couple interesting chunks of code, I'm technically in the same situation. So whether the GPL code contributes
This gets back to the original point, which is that the GPL is designed to help create a library of Free code that can be used by any Free Software developer. You're saying "I can't steal just a little bit." and indeed, you're right, you can't, by design. You also can't mix that proprietary code into Free code.
I know the immediate response to that is "then don't use it, you have a choice" -- which is what I do, but it doesn't change viral nature. Version 3 of the license doesn't seem to address this issue and it is one of the big reasons why anyone thinking of using any GPL code needs to think about it carefully because it remains an ALL or NONE proposition. To me, that's what makes it viral in nature.
Fiften, or even ten years ago, people with that perspective may have been able to be convincing, and they argued for the BSD license. There are plenty of people in the BSD community would agree with you, and find that the GPL is too restrictive for them. If that's what they, and you, believe, then you have all the rights to go ahead and use what you feel is a more appropriate license for your work. But since then, in the ~20 years of the GPL, there is now far more code available under it than under the BSD license, including code from buisnesses.
I think a major reason for that is the exact reason that you've pointed out as a "viral" quality- that is that with the GPL, no one can get a leg up on the original developer. It's "Come and join us." or "Sorry, we can't help you.". If Sun had a license which allowed you to as you wanted with OpenOffice.Org, then they'd be at a disadvantage against you.
It's a shame that you don't use our work and contribute to the community, but that's your choice.
No, he doesn't. He actually mentiones military use as something he says that the GPL must support, since we want the best software working for our military, we'd hope they'd use GNU. He says this specificallly in a GPL3 talk.
What he says there is that the license may be legally valid.
The person whose saying he agrees with their goals is the OSI person, Russ Nelson, not RMS.
Free Software must be Free Software for any use. It's a similar argument against commercial use, it's morally unacceptable to prevent anyone from using the software, commercially or militarily, or used in a classroom or by an individual.
My take is that the initial reads should be practical, then slowly they should move into theory.
Therefore my first pick is the book that got me started:
Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (first edition)
It's a very pragmatic guide to learning the Unix command shell and system layout.
My second pick is Think Unix by Jon Lasser, which covers using Unix systems but also gives a bit of background and teaches the lesson on how to learn.
Lastly, to go into the pure theory, Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming is a wonderful guide on explaining *why* things are the way they are in Unix (and by extension, GNU/Linux).
As a very happy Ubuntu user, I'm scared.
But it could be worse, it could be "Ubuntu, supported by SGI"
I don't see this as a real problem for a variety of reasons.
First, as many have pointed out Java is a trademark that Sun owns. They can control it. I can't fork Java and call it Java. I could maybe fork it and call it "Half-Skim Soy Latte" but that's not Java.
Considering how many Java alternatives there are already, I don't see it getting worse.
But there are plenty of languages with an official version other spinoffs. Perl and Python both have an official version and then spinoffs.
I remember hearing about two or three weeks ago that Sun said it was committed to "Open Sourcing all of its software, everything they make."- this is from LugRadio and a Sun representative.
/very/ progressive stance, I don't see why they're stalling when it comes to Java.
Given this
If anything, this slows Java adoption.
Java was all the rage in the late 90s. Had they made it Free, I think it would have been a tour de force. Now we see competition from simpler technologies. We're learning that we don't need a J2EE infrastructure when a simple Model-View-Controller model with a database backend will do the job just as well, and so on.
Freeing Java would spread adoption, if nothing else than by including it in every distribution shortly thereafter.
This new license system isn't good enough, it'll just frustrate people.
It's a buisness decision and it's about core competancy.
Oracle is a software development company. They have decidated staff who develop and support a core set of products.
When looking at a new product line like "Oracle Linux"- they'll need to spend resources on it. Resources will include developers, project managers, physical space, computers, the whole thing. If they use existing staff, they'll have to be retrained in a new area of development. And it's all untested- essentially a crap shoot as to whether or not it will all work out.
Buying another company solves all the resource problems, and Suse has a track record of success. It's a safer bet.
Sorry AC, but at work, we purchased a bunch of "N" series workstations, and they all came with FreeDOS. I don't know what Dell does for all their products, but that's what they did in our case.
As for "Stop spreading misinformation."- it's my experience, and it makes sense for them to do that for reasons mentioned in the story.
I have several of the disks and license agreements since I thought it was neat that they went through the effort of burning professional CDs and making a printed copy of the GPL to go along with the computer.
Besides the other poster's insightful comment about BIOS updates, you also want to remember that Dell sells various distributions as add-ons that they charge for. They don't want to compete with themselves.
Most of the other Free OSes either compete with the product they're selling, or aren't ready for mass use yet (sorry Syllable).
I think this is why when Dell sells a computer without an operating system (their N series), they ship it with FreeDOS.
That's a legal operating system. It comes with a CD of FreeDos and a printed copy of the GPL.
I agree, and am going to expand on the parent poster's point.
/your/ boss cares about, the buisness.
Buzzwords like "Web 2.0" are, for the most part, nonesense. Sometimes vendors have come up with terms for things that already exist, like NAS instead of NFS. Sometimes these words are meaningless, and you should try to resist them by focusing your energy on what
And that gets me to the second point, which is what the parent said, "delieverable" isn't a buzzword. It's jargon. Specifically, it's buisness jargon, the language of those you're now working with. Other words like "opportunity" may be there to foster a specific kind of thinking. You could be cynical and think that it's all nonesense, or you could get what you can from it and try to use it.
The most important thing to remember is that neither is important- what's important is providing the information your boss needs in the form that's best for him/her. At the end of the day, whether you use plain English, technical jargon or buisness jargon, it doesn't matter- your objective isn't to "make a point" so much as get your job done. You were promoted and placed in a position with a new set of challenges, specifically working wiith new people, people who aren't on the same wavelength as you in terms of language. Consider it a learning experience, wether or not you agree with it, and I'm sure you'll find a way to express yourself and provide value in your new role. It's good to see system administrators being seen as valuable enough to be promoted- it's a rare event.