FSF's Opinion of the Apple Public Source License 344
Stian Engen writes "Bradley Kuhn of the FSF does not recommend the release of new software using the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 2.0 despite its
newly accuired Free Software License."
This is no big deal (Score:3, Informative)
Even a handful of Copy-lefted ones.
This is essentially a copy left for everyone escept Apple, who gets BSD like (from the FSF comments, I couldn't find that in the actual liscense though).
practically every non GPL compatible Copy-Left on their site says "though it is OK to use this software we recomend against using the liscense for new software".
And all the BSDish ones recomend using the X11 liscense instead. I don't see how this is news one bit.
Re:Yet another duplicate story (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And?!? (Score:1, Informative)
Furthermore, a license doesn't upgrade automatically, as you seem to imply : something released under the GPL 2.0 doesn't move to GPL 3.0 unless the owner decides to do so. Again, the owner chooses. And finally, even if the owner release something under the GPL, he still own it and can release it under different licenses as he see fit.
I hope this will help you understand the nature of the FSF movement.
This is not true anymore... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And?!? (Score:2, Informative)
Remember Ogg Vorbis? (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous [xiph.org] people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here [slashdot.org].
No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.
Re:You needs a dose of SCO... (Score:1, Informative)
Freeware is not OSS, Freeware is only the binarys are aviable "for free", not the source code is aviable for modification and re-distribution (OSS, which ASPL is).
Vague? (Score:2, Informative)
This is interesting... (Score:4, Informative)
As is every other license on the planet... The GPL is pretty much the only exception.
Fair enough, that's one big red check-mark.
That's being quite hypocritical there. Their policy is that software released under every other license should be able to be GPL'd, but it's fine that, once GPL'd, it can't be used with software under any other license... Really, really one-sided guys.
Of course, if that was a problem, they could very well change the GPL now couldn't they??? No, they'd rather have the rest of the world change to what they want.
Re:And?!? (Score:2, Informative)
Not only that, you persist in confusing "Socialism" with "Communism", and in turn you confuse "Communism" with "Stalinism/Totalitarianism" None of which are particularly similiar to one another.
Capitalist countries and corporations have done a lot of nasty things in their time, just as many Stalinist/Totalitarianist countries have. Bopal is a good start, and I also do not remember Iraq being a "Socialist" country either. Neither are the vast majority of African nations, and I and many others believe that the imprisionment of "Illegal Combatants" in Camp X-Ray is illegal and immoral.
Left, right, they're all bastards.
Clippy says (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, I know you're trolling. I just like biting, that's all. First you suggest democratic, socialist countries (e.g. Canada and most of Europe) would act like despotic, anti-democratic rulers in Middle East countries. Yes, Iraq has social schemes, but the main problem was it wasn't exactly democratic! Then you suggest Microsoft isn't anticompetitive.
Having people thrown in prison for disagreeing with you is totalitarianism. Socialism is when the state funds social projects instead of trusting to altruistic third parties. The USA has many socialist schemes, including social welfare, public libraries, police, courts and (limited) medical care, even though it's significantly less socialist than some other first world countries.
Microsoft functions well because it makes (and has made) a decent product.
Sorry buddy, Microsoft uses the dominant market share "decent product" as leverage in anticompetitive behaviour. Other companies have made even better products than Microsoft, but MS uses anticompetitive tactics against them. This is fact. For example, making secret deals with PC vendors to ensure they only ever offer MS operating systems bundled with their computers. Imagine if Coke charged stores extra for their product if they also stocked Pepsi.
Microsoft has a dominant share of the desktop computer market in OSes and office software. Do they have a dominant share of the server market? No. However, they use deliberate dirty tricks -- regularly changing, undocumented, non-standard file formats and network protocols -- in order to try and gain server market share. "You can't use non-Microsoft servers to service Microsoft desktops". That's anti-competitive.
Same problam as with original BSD license (Score:4, Informative)
Heh. The FSF has this to say about the original BSD license; I suspect you would see the same thing happen with APSL2-licensed stuff...
There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, including the X10 license, the X11/XFree86 license, the FreeBSD license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses. Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Initially the obnoxious BSD advertising clause was used only in the Berkeley Software Distribution. That did not cause any particular problem, because including one sentence in an ad is not a great practical difficulty.
If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the University of California--then they would not have made the problem any bigger.
But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.
When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would not be surprised if the list has grown by now. [Remember, this was written in 1998; this has obviously not happened.]
Jay (=
Re:Circular reasoning (Score:2, Informative)
This is why the APSL is an Open Source license instead of a Free Software license.
Umm, APSL 2.0 is a "free software" license:
The Apple Public Source License (APSL) version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license. [gnu.org]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Darwinism vs. Socialism (Score:3, Informative)
(ok, synthesizing things from geography, british and russian history, economics, and poli-sci... done).
In china, at lease people are breeding because they want to have a male child. China is the home of the "20 million missing girls", based on the chinese birth rate, historically, of males:females, and the number of males:females that survive to age 1.
But, here in america, we're breeding based on height, weight, eye color, hair, and dancing ability.
I don't think that socialism or capitalism has to do with people breeding when they shouldn't. And I don't blame china for their economic policy regarding 1 child per family. From what I learned in human geography, China's population will continue to grow, even at 1 child per family and no children until age 22, until 2016. They will reach very hard economic times based simply on population growth, but if they had done nothing, there would have been widespread famine very quickly. They will hit 1.5 billion people before going down (they're at 1.2 now), and if they go much higher than 1.6, it's expected that many, many of them will die, and at 2.0 billion, it's expected that hundreds of millions will die because of starvation.
The relationship to communism isn't hard to see here, but it's hardly to blame. When Mao took over, he wanted to create a chinese world power, which he did. He encouraged the Chinese to have multiple childre, not realizing how fast it would backfire.
Think now, though, growing up with not only no brothers and sisters, but no cousins and uncles.
Anyway,
I just wanted to say that my eariler post on socialism wasn't just from crap i'd read online. I'm a history major, about to graduate. I've had over 30 hours of history, plus 6 of geography, 9 of political science, and 6 of economics. I tried to make it as well reasoned and articulate as I could.
Random thoughts, i'm tired..