Brad Ideas - Blog entry - Comments

Proposing and using

brad — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:12:49 -0700

Yes, my main goal is to stimulate discussion of

whether it’s a good idea
what terms would be likely to entice owners of Windows packages to release their code to the FOSS world
what terms would be likely to encourage or discourage FOSS programmers from contributing to such packages

And see where people think the balance lies. The big barrier, unfortunately, is probably that vendors of proprietary programs might feel that they are giving away their crown jewels if they put the source out there.

Ah yes, Motif

brad — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:10:45 -0700

I had forgotten about that one. BTW, I don’t think the GPL forbids having a linux distro that includes proprietary software, but some people seem to so they always make it download the proprietary code to keep people happy.

OpenMotif

Adam Sampson — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:03:28 -0700

The OpenMotif license is another example of an existing software license that's intended to work this way (and that apparently works well enough for some Linux distributions to ship it).

"I promise"

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:14:04 -0700

Someone pointed out that in a sentence like "I promise", the deed being described by the sentence is identical with the sentence itself. Saying "I eat" is not the same thing as eating, but saying "I promise" is the same thing as promising. (Saying "I regret" is the same thing as regretting, but it is possible to regret without saying so.)

"What I propose is a GPL-like licence" is almost in the same category. All you have to do is draw it up and post it on the web and it exists. Whether or not anyone uses it, of course, is a different matter.

Some projects will work on all platforms

brad — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:01:08 -0700

Of course there are projects that are big enough and important enough that people develop them for all platforms, like Firefox. Is QT a huge success? Perhaps not, but it is not a failure.

So what other proposal would you put forward to get these Windows packages ported to Linux? The companies don’t want to do it, and only for a few of them is the FOSS community ready to do a Firefox like effort to duplicate them.

Not DRM, Not EULAs

brad — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:59:03 -0700

No, it’s not a DRM. A DRM is a technology to make sure something only works on an authorized player. You will need to explain to me what in here is like a DRM.

As for EULAs this is very definitely not that. The GPL essentially works by saying, “You may only copy this if you obey the following rules” and gives rules about requiring you to publish source, and pass the rights on to all you copy to. This would work the same way — “you may only modify this code for purposes other than running on Windows.” If somebody makes a modified version of the code (a derivative work) including a compiled binary, and it is for Windows, they are not given permission to make the work, and so it is as much a copyright violation as an unpaid WAREZ version of the official Windows binary would be.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it

Felix Plesoianu — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:40:28 -0700

No offense, but bwahahahaha. Qt was just like that initially: free and open source, but only on Linux and similar platforms. The result? Hardly anyone used it at all. And Firefox? How exactly do you figure they competed with IE? By running on the same platform: Windows. Duuuh! Want more examples? Open Office.

"plan b" sounds more like

openuniverse — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:09:08 -0700

"plan b" sounds more like some kind of drm... nasty

plan a reeks of eula's. this kind of thinking probably wouldn't even exist if people had the sense to stop making people click on dialogs where they "agree" to the gpl as a prerequisite to installing. the gpl doesn't require compliance until you try to REDISTRIBUTE the software, eh?

You've lost me

brad — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:47:46 -0700

The AFPL, as far as I read it, is a no-commercial-distribution licence.

What I’m talking about is a licence that tries to say, “Versions that run on Windows are the province of the original software author. On FOSS platforms, treat it like GPL.”

That is definitely not what AFPL says.

As to whether people will use it, I think the following are true:

There’s lots of good software found on Windows which is not available on Linux and for which the vendor has decided they do not want to sell to the Linux market.
Some of those vendors might be happy with letting the FOSS community port their systems to Linux, *BSD etc. as long as it doesn’t hurt their Windows market very much, or in particular actually helps them (by providing more community, bug fixes, enhancements etc.)
There is some set of terms that will convince vendors to do this, the question is, are those terms too onerous to the FOSS community to attract developers?

I think we would all love it if Adobe would let the Linux community port Photoshop to Linux. Is there something that could make that happen?

already exists, not used

Russ Nelson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:00:08 -0700

The license you're talking about already exists, but it's hardly used at all. It's the Aladdin Free Public License. It doesn't allow you to distribute the software on the same media as any proprietary software. As far as I know, Ghostscript is the only package that uses it. It's been around for about twenty years now. If your idea was a good one, someone would have likely picked up the AFPL.

Actually....

ccohen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:05:03 -0700

You ask whether Time Travel is categorically possible, with emphasis on travelling farther into the future.
It has in fact been proven that someone can travel into the future at a faster rate. This depends on the speed the person is travelling.
For example, in numerous scientific studies, physicists have synchronized atomic clocks and have placed one on a jet and another on the ground (i.e. no relative motion). The result is that the atomic clock on the jet is a few nanoseconds behind the one that remained on the ground. This means that the clock aged more slowly then per usual and thus has reached the present faster.
Of course this is nigh insignificant but at speeds close to the speed of light, it has been theorized that one could travel hundreds of years into the future while only having aged anywhere between a few weeks to a few months.
(An interesting tid-bit in SF, it has been hypothesized that if this technology were possible, you could have a theater full of people watch a half a show with a younger cast, go at a fraction of the speed of light and return 20 years in the future (more or less a day depending on the speed, and watch the 2nd half with a more matured cast. Wouldn't that be exciting)
Anyway, travelling in the future is not difficult as we are doing this already. However, if you go into the future, our current understanding of Physics and Space-Time have no way of bringing you back to your 'natural' time. (Perhaps somewhere delved within Quantum Mechanics, M-theory or something unknown holds the answer.)
Good Luck though

To say that American Express

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:13:35 -0800

To say that American Express is not an American company is more correct than you may know. Over a decade ago they began tossing their American employees out and replacing them with Indian contractors who were brought to this country on work visas. They weren't taking jobs that Americans didn't want (if such a thing actually exists). They were taking good to high-paying technology and finance jobs. And, then it happened slowly but surely and unpredictable only to utter idiots. The contractors became the experts of the realm of their responsibilities and to ensure control over that expertise, the company hired them as employees. Indian non-managers became managers and then vice presidents and then senior vice presidents. Today, the average American would be hard pressed to readily pronounce the names of most of the resources who now occupy the offices and cubes at American Express' American sites. The best part is that they forgot to leave their discriminatory, classist beliefs at the airport. So, not only are these American sites run by non-Americans, the nature of the working environments is distinctly non-American. Manipulation, cronyism and oppression (particularly of women) reign. Our government leaders talk about job creation. How can they not know that simply by putting controls on H1B1 visas, they would make tens of thousands of jobs once again available to Americans -- the people who made this company and the people who still represent their greatest revenue pool?

Amex does drug testing

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:55:13 -0800

Amex does drug testing apparently because they prefer employees who are naturally stupid. Their leaders are as ignorant as they are arrogant and darn proud of it.

Good points

brad — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:40:46 -0800

I agree they are not entirely serious about paying out, and more want the publicity. But I liked the controversy it started, because of the conflict of values — ethical treatment, environmental damage and fear of “frankenfoods.”

But while clearly eggs and dairy are not as bad by any of the measures as beef is, they have enough problems to be worth attacking, and they seem — by intuition — to be more tractable problems as they are liquids.

Frankly the 2012 timeframe

Joel Upchurch — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:28:09 -0800

Frankly the 2012 timeframe indicates to me that they aren't serious. This area of research isn't actually being ignored and a million dollars isn't much incentive to speed it up. Also the texture is a bigger technical issue than the taste, as you pointed out. Also beef is a much more suitable target, since the GHG footprint is 13 times higher per pound of meat and people are already used to eating ground beef. Reducing GHG emissions might save a lot more animals than go to the slaughter house, including some that can vote.

Here is a blog post I wrote that links to issues on GHG footprints of meat.

http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/12/greenhouse-gas-footprint-f...