Digana - Slashdot User

Emacs violates GPL since 2009-> 0

Submitted by Digana on Friday July 29 2011, @02:07AM

Digana writes "Emacs, one of GNU's flagship products and most famous software creation of Richard Stallman, has been discovered to be violating the GPL since 2009-09-28 by distributing binaries that were missing source. The CEDET package, a set of contributed files for giving certain IDE functionality related to static code analysis, has distributed files generated from bison grammars without distributing the grammar itself. This happened for Emacs versiones 23.2 and 23.3, released during late 2009, and has just been discovered."
Link to Original Source

Octave 3.4 released after 2 years of development-> 0

Submitted by Digana on Thursday February 10 2011, @10:07AM

Digana writes "Two years have passed since the last 3.2 release, so the Octave team is proud to announce its 3.4 release stable release. Besides lots of indexing optimisations, function handle improvements, and a large rewrite of sparse matrix support, there is a particularly exciting new OpenGL plotting engine that is ready to replace gnuplot in most cases."
Link to Original Source

Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode -> 1

Submitted by Digana on Monday August 02 2010, @09:41PM

Digana writes "Deldo is a vibration control package for emacs, allowing any and all emacs hooks to have haptic event additions. Currently deldo works with the Rez Trancevibe/Drmn Trancevibe, but can easily be edited to work with other computer controllable toys."
Link to Original Source

Mathworks goads to BSD license, tries to restrict 0

Submitted by Digana on Thursday February 18 2010, @12:20PM

Digana writes "About six months ago, the Mathworks decided to move all of the publicly hosted free software on their File Exchange website to the BSD license exclusively, or remove it if it couldn't or wouldn't be relicensed. Some projects stayed under the GPL and moved elsewhere, while others relicensed.

The real surprise is that their Terms of Service now has an additional clause: "All content contained in the MATLAB Central File Exchange may only be used with MathWorks products," an attempt to create an additional restriction over the terms of the BSD license and forbid the use of alternative software like GNU Octave or Freemat, which are largely compatible with the Matlab language. This has a sparked a lively debate in the Octave mailing lists."

Mathworks fighting GPL, lying 0

Submitted by Digana on Wednesday February 10 2010, @07:34PM

Digana writes "This happened rather quietly July last year, but the Mathworks, creators of the popular mathematical software Matlab, rejected any non-BSD free code publicly hosted in their servers. Most noticeably, much GPL code was affected by this decision, although the Mathwork's word choice avoids specifying if this is about fighting copyleft or not.

According to private emails they sent, code under the GPL had to be removed from the servers, which contradicts their public statement about the relicensing."

Mathworks exchanges copyleft for BSD-> 0

Submitted by Digana on Wednesday February 10 2010, @07:09PM

Digana writes "This happened rather quietly July last year, but the Mathworks, creators of the popular mathematical software Matlab, rejected any non-BSD free code publicly hosted in their servers. Most noticeably, much GPL code was affected by this decision, although the Mathwork's word choice avoids specifying if this is about fighting copyleft or not.

Code licensed under the GPL had to be removed from the servers if it couldn't be relicensed."
Link to Original Source

Can you copyright IM conversations? 0

Submitted by Digana on Thursday July 30 2009, @09:55AM

Digana writes "I have witnessed a recent incident where two people were having one of those online spats over a website's messaging system. One of the parties decided to make the conversation public for whatever reason, and the other requested that his side of the conversation be altered, removed, or censored claiming copyright on his side of the conversation.

In Estate of Hemingway v Random House, the copyrightability of conversations was denied in the US citing that for such a conversation to be copyrightable, it would be required that
be required that the speaker indicated that he to mark off the utterance in question from the ordinary stream of speech, that he meant to adopt it as a unique statement, and that he wished to exercise control over its publication.

Are online communications somehow different from this decision pertaining to IRL conversations? I know email correspondence is usually agreed to be copyrighted, but what about IM or similar?"

Grousing over rejected job application 0

Submitted by Digana on Saturday January 10 2009, @11:21AM

Digana writes "I am living in an unwealthy country where a good salary is in the range of 1,000 EUR per month, and I visited one of the Commonwealth countries, where a friend unexpectedly got me a job interview at a handheld videogame company. They offered me the job, and for three months made me do paperwork, and I even swapped emails with the people there asking about the nature of the job and what sort of literature I should be reading. It was a common Debian sysadminning job, taking care of their servers.

Then a couple of days ago, after they've jerked me around for those months, they inform me that due to the "economic climate", they cannot hire me after all. I've sent them a strongly worded reply, and I'm now pondering my next move. I probably have already ruined my opportunities of future employment there, so should I try to sue them for deceiving me? Should I let it go? Should I hope that they might still want to hire me later if they lift the hiring freeze? I heard that about 40 other people are in the same situation as I am, and the laws of the target country allow class action suits (the laws of the source country, needless to say, are ineffective)."

Elsevier supports, then retires crackpot editor-> 0

Submitted by Digana on Wednesday December 03 2008, @12:56AM

Digana writes "M. S. El Naschie has long been the editor-in-chief of the Elsevier publication Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, and he has also been its most active contributor. However, he has also been publishing pseudoscientific rubbish and numerology, which has been uncovered by prominent theoretical physicist John Baez. Elsevier has since stated in a private communication that El Naschie will be retired from his position.

This whole affair, however, does not bode well for the opponents of open access journals, as this is clear evidence that the parasitic influence that Elsevier and other publishers have on the scientific community cannot prevent crackpot rubbish to be caught in time. The worst part is that this journal costs 4520 USD anually and is part of bundles that university libraries purchase from Elsevier en masse."
Link to Original Source

Google rejects code covered by AGPL 0

Submitted by Digana on Friday April 25 2008, @12:07AM

Digana writes "Still chipping away at the famed "do no evil" unofficial policy, Google has decided to reject code covered by the FSF's AGPL. While claiming that this is done to avoid license proliferation, others seem unconvinced by this doublethink argument. In the meantime, projects such as Clipperz are unwelcome in Google's servers and have moved to Sourceforge. Since the AGPL is designed precisely to close the so-called ASP gap that Google has been exploiting to take free code without giving back code, nobody seems surprised that Google rejects the AGPL."