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It may be my imagination but as someone who took part in the forums here from near the beginning I have been unable to be as involved over the last couple of years because of work. When I do visit now (still probably briefly every day even when I don't post anything) I see names I don't really recognise appearing. It may be anecdotal but I get the feeling that there is a core of us long time member but there is a growth in new members (albeit much slower than the early days) and a passing group of transient members who either only drop in from time to time or drift away.
None of this comes as a surprise to me as it is what happens in 'real' life as well as in the 'virtual' world.-Carol Haynes (February 25, 2011, 06:40 AM)
Well irc comforting peace and consensus on piracy probably is nice to experience. Does it take a whole 5 secs to reach agreement?-Bamse (February 25, 2011, 07:26 AM)
Actually, linux and windows should swap now. I have FAR MORE updates for my linux box than I do for Windows. Point being, Windows 7 in the last month has had 9 patches on my system. In the last week, I've had 19 patches for ubuntu 10.10 and 25 for opensuse 11.3-Josh (February 25, 2011, 07:25 AM)
Is this natural forum behaviour-nudone (February 25, 2011, 05:55 AM)
Aww, I didn't even have to do shameless self promotion-f0dder (February 25, 2011, 06:15 AM)
fSekrit is a small application for keeping securely encrypted notes. These notes are truly stand-alone; the editor program and your note are merged together into a tiny self-contained program file, bypassing the need to install a special application to view your data. This makes fSekrit ideal for keeping encrypted notes on, for example, USB flash drives.
Interesting, but I can't get past the fact it's a very patronizing tone.-timns (February 24, 2011, 07:22 PM)
I guess it's kind of like Al Gore "inventing" the internet. If you are a Democrat ward boss then I'm sure for you he did. Other people think internet developed for quite awhile and zoomed to popularity in the early 90s.-MilesAhead (February 24, 2011, 02:51 PM)
Internet of Lies
Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.
Status: False.
Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word "invent," and the words "create" and "invent" have distinctly different meanings — the former is used in the sense of "to bring about" or "to bring into existence" while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone's thinking up or implementing an idea. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean exactly the same thing, we have to ask why, then, the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet, even though he never used that word, and transcripts of what he actually said were readily available.)
And nobody is required to sign in under the GPL. It's purely voluntary. So how is that "taking freedom away" from anybody?
This (but an example for Creative Commons) http://blog.internet...-results-in-lawsuit/-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 04:58 PM)
Freedom also involves opt-out. Just in case, a license maker may not be fully aware of the implications.
It's something that FSF rarely address but it can't be helped. Libre impression has helped them a lot but if they really wanted to align themselves with the gratis movement - they'd replace Free with Released. Would summarize many of the licensing ignorance around. Of course "software that might be potential abandonware" isn't as catchy as "open source".
Also for GPL, there isn't as major a controversy yet as what happened with Creative Commons.
As for using "even one line of this code in your own code" from GPL'd software , if it's only one line of code (or only a few lines of code), it's likely to be only a tiny bit more difficult to write the code yourself using whatever ideas you might need from the original code than it is to merely copy the code. Also, even the FSF acknowledges that there's a "fair use" right to the code that's not subject to the license (though fair use isn't particularly well-defined): http://www.gnu.org/l...-faq.html#GPLFairUse-mwb1100 (February 24, 2011, 04:19 PM)
My only gripe with the FSF is their use of the phrase "FREE SOFTWARE".-rxantos (February 24, 2011, 02:52 PM)
[Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective "free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with few or no restrictions" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents.
They state that is based on freedom but fail to indicate that the freedom of the consumer is at the cost of freedom for the developer.
You can't un-GPL something later on, or otherwise try to get it back by adding proprietary elements to it. Because those will also fall immediately under GPL if you do.-40hz (February 24, 2011, 01:19 PM)
This is only half correct. Once you GPL something and distribute it, you can't remove the GPL rights that you've essentially already passed on to someone else for what they have.
However, GPL doen't remove *your* ownership of the code (or whatever) - you can re-release the code under whatever other terms you like (even simultaneously). As the owner - *you* are not obligated to the GPL terms for subsequent releases (modified or not).-mwb1100 (February 24, 2011, 01:47 PM)
It's out where anybody can get it which means kind of like yellow journalism, if you are a big enough company who needs marketshare more than money especially if your software is starting to trail off, you open source or creative commons it-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 12:45 PM)
Understood.
But I think if you read what I wrote you'd see I wasn't attempting to moderate. Nor did I suggest he shouldn't say what he did. Nor did I hit the 'report to mod' button. Nor in any other way do anything to imply he didn't have a 'right' (whatever that means in this context) to say what he did.
To do any of the above would have been me trying to bring about an outcome. Since there was no agenda behind my question, I didn't have an outcome in mind.
Now who's talking like an attorney?-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 12:10 PM)
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look that one! You can't Ubuntu Arch or Gentoo.-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 11:04 AM)
Same thing with GPL and Creative Commons. Someone will use those selfishly to protect their work if they are bound to lose a product like what happened with Netscape.-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 11:04 AM)
If you don't speak about the how, you're just white washing IMO.-Paul Keith (February 24, 2011, 11:42 AM)