Again, same for either program. Both are installed by the user to filter out unwanted content, with the program's maker in the end deciding what's considered "unwanted" (the user only gets to set a category, i.e. "porn" in one and "ad junk" in the other).
Sure. Lets pander to the flavor of the month corporation just because they are the trendy thing today. Let's forget about the DECADES of work and progress that has gone into the collective body of Free Software. Let's also give a big "fuck you" to all of the nice contributors while we are at it.
It's Apple that's the newcomer playing the jerk imposing restrictions that are entirely unnecessary.
Freedom is not a Mad Max free-for-all where Apple can try to be the boss of the Thunderdome.
You must be a sociopath then, or work for one.
That's really the only reason to not use something with a copyleft license.
All the GPL does is enforce that "everyone plays nice" with a shared resource. If you can't do that, then you're an anti-social jackass that should be shunned.
Stick to the LGPL and it's not even any more viral than anything else.
Because moving from one proprietary language/library ecosystem to another proprietary language/library ecosystem is somehow an improvement.
Fuck them both. We have truly open ecosystems like C++, and I would encourage any sensible developer going forward to move away from the likes of Java and the
But cleanroom implementations are meaningless if copyright can be asserted over the API. Clean room implementations only work because it has been generally understood that an API itself is essentially a directory listing, like a phone book, that in and of itself does not constitute some sort of creative work. Before the Oracle case, it was assumed that it was the code itself that constituted the intellectual property. But that is now apparently no longer true, and thus the Win32 API has gained the same level of protection as the source code.
If this stands, and is not corrected either by a lower court or by Congress, no one will every try a clean room implementation of any non-free library again, because there's a real likelihood that you would find yourself sued into oblivion for breach of copyright.
Wine may be safe because MS is being constrained by future potential anti-competitive suits, and of course Samba is protected because of a deal cut with the EU. But from this day foreward, clean room implementation of proprietary APIs, and I assume any other software spec (document format, communications protocol, etc.) will have absolutely no protection under the law.
Was it all uniform though? As an IT guy, I can relate to black listing certain types of updates and preventing Microsoft from just force feeding updates to everyone.
It's the perpetual problem of Microsoft not really being responsible with the hardware vendor really being the one on the hook. They are likely to suffer for Microsoft's mistakes.
...true. But this is much more like the "Pink Slime" controversy over there in the States. People were not aware of what was going on and reacted quite badly when the cat was finally let out of the bag.
Legal warfare against the relevant whistle blowers in the news media commenced.
The offending meat companies claimed damages.
Would you contribute to a future project like Samba or Wine now?
It certainly is looking that way, but there is the whole notion that what amount to call tables can be copyrighted. What the supreme Court has done here is basically unravel the common understanding of the difference between spec and implementation, and if Java is the most obviously vulnerable, in a very real way it means any number of APIs that have been re-implemented (like the standard *nix set of system calls) could suddenly be plunged into a purgatory-like nether world. I made vulgar jokes about using stdio.h in C programs, but that's the real question. Considering that in many cases header files and libraries whose origins go back decades in many different languages and on many different architectures could become low-hanging fruit, and since copyrights are in most industrialized countries are essentially perpetual now, big software houses now have a far better club to beat competitors with than patents.
Do you think another Samba or Wine project could happen if the lower courts rule for Oracle? Who would be crazy enough to even try?
No, we need a court to determine whether a company can block something for you.
Which seems odd considering that Net Nanny and the likes have been offering essentially the exact same service for years now and nobody bothered to complain.
While true, judges tend to follow the ruling on the table. If only to appear consistent and not wanting to contradict their peers.
Twice so in a matter where most judges don't have the slightest inkling of an idea what's going on. Like, say, "anything computer/internet".
Fucking hell, I guess I'm utterly fucked, because pretty much every C program I've ever written includes #include <stdio>. Here I thought I was invoking a free and open set of library functions passed on down since the 1970s, and now it turns out I've been stealing someone's hard work in creating a standard set of functional calls. I'm dirty fucking thief.
If specifications alone can be copyrighted, then the software industry is in for a world of hurt.
A function name and parameter spec is now "someone's shit"? Oracle's position is about as sensible as SCO's was.
All the early games I played were very "crunchy"; D&D, AD&D, Palladium, Twilight 2000 and Traveler 2300. The inelegance of such systems really began to drive me nuts, and I ended up going with Fudge and its variants like Fate. I never really played Gurps very much, but as I recall it was the middle ground between the kind of ultra-loose systems like Fudge and the very complex systems like AD&D. Now, I run a couple of PBeMs; a Palladium Rifts one and a home-brew heavily narrative game in the Harn universe, and dice are rarely used in the Palladium game, and not even part of the Harn game
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]
