Yeah, I found the relation to German "arbeit" interesting.

I wish I would have took some linguistic and phonology classes while I was in university. I took a class on words with Greek and Latin roots and a few entry level language classes, but that's it.

Interesting. Here's what etymonline.com has to say. Apologies for those that don't read etymology definitions often... they can be somewhat confusing sometimes. This one isn't too bad.

1923, from Eng. translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "slave," from robota "forced labor, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave" (see orphan), from a Slavic stem related to Ger. Arbeit "work" (O.H.G. arabeit). According to Rawson the word was popularized by Karel Capek's play, "but was coined by his brother Josef (the two often collaborated), who used it initially in a short story." Robotics coined 1941 in a science fiction context by Isaac Asimov, who proposed the "Three Laws of Robotics" in 1968.

I like to mod those posts up so people start to wonder if the story is actually true.

It's my own little April Fools joke.

I think there already was a browser called Phoenix once upon a time, but they had to change the name do to some trademark issue. Can't remember what it's called now. How about something that still captures the idea behind the Phoenix but won't get Mozilla into trademark trouble... like Firebird.

That took you thirty seconds?

It's not the distribution part that makes your code have to be licensed under the GPL, it's the derived work part.

From my understanding, Nvidia wrote Windows drivers and then ported them to Linux, creating a GPL wrapper as an extra layer of protection. The drivers obviously aren't derived works of Linux if they were written for Windows.

I'll admit it's a complicated issue, but I have to disagree with you. I don't think anything can be said for certain until their is some case law to back either side.

What you're suggesting is that GPL licensing your code doesn't protect it at all because I can just isolate any GPL code from my non-GPL application and link to it dynamically.

That's a pretty strong statement to make.

The reason people can link to glibc and libreadline without GPLing their apps is because they are writing their application against a generic interface . Just because I happen to be linking to glibc doesn't GPL my app--it could just as easily compile against any other standard C library (quirks aside). The same goes for libreadline. libreadline used to be the only interface for "readline" but now it's become more generic since theirs a BSD clone of it. You can now link an app against libreadline without GPLing it, because it could just as easily have been linked against libedit.

In Microsoft speak a RC is a feature complete product, parts are still buggy but the capabilities are in, they still reservice the right to add features but will not remove them.

Ohhh... so it's a beta!

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

I have a suggestion. I find these threads quite interesting, but they hardly qualify as news and I don't think we want to see them every day (we're just going to exhaust all decent ideas if we do). Why not do something like this on Fridays instead of the stupid mailbag?

Does anyone agree?

I agree. I really enjoy reading through these, although I probably won't read through this entire thread, since I'm a vim user :)

I have a suggestion/proposal, though: I find these threads really interesting, but they hardly qualify as news and I don't think we want to see them every day. Why not do something like this on Fridays instead of the mailbag? I think many people would prefer that.