Category: computers

Free Abandonware Public License

Steve Dekorte suggests that the GNU General Public License indirectly helps giant software houses to maintain their monopolies by failing to enable smalltime software developers to compete in the commercial arena, and the BSD license has the opposite effect.

The FSF considers all proprietary software, whether by bigtime or smalltime developers, equally undesirable, so this wouldn’t faze them. But it did get me thinking about different licensing possibilities.

The most interesting one that hit me (while I was thinking through this stuff in the shower) was the concept of a Free Abandonware Public License.

This would be a license which like the BSD license would allow you to use its code in commercial products, but which like the GPL was viral, and “infected” those products with certain restrictions. To wit, when one “end of lifed” a commercial product containing FAPLed code — ceased selling or supporting it — one would be required to allow people to freely copy and trade that product, as if it were “freeware.”

Perhaps it would just make free trading and copying legal; perhaps it would force it into the public domain, or perhaps there would be some intermediate option like coercing it into the Free Abandonware Public License. Releasing the source might or might not be required.

This would allow people always to have the latest version of their product for sale, but would serve the GPLish goal of creating an ever growing pool of “free” (under some definition of the word) software.

GoboLinux

Via Slashdot, a spiff article on the radical changes that might be made to create a really excellent, user-friendly desktop machine out of Linux.

The bit that stuck out for me was the pointer to GoboLinux, an alternative linux distro with nice OSX-like package management.

From their FAQ:

GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as /usr and /etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as /Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.

To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as /System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.

To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as “/usr/bin -> /System/Links/Executables”, and “/sbin -> /System/Links/Executables” (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).

I’d love to try that. Sounds cool.

Call Japan for 2.9cents/minute, open sourcely?

Gizmo CallOut is an open source, open standards, generally open alternative to Skype. Ironically, unlike Skype, Gizmo does not have a working Linux version, but they promise to in August.

Looks like Skype’s rates are slightly better. I don’t know much about Skype despite having downloaded it and played with it once, so I can’t say overall whether Gizmo is that much better, worse, or whatever, but it has features Skype denies you, like the ability to easily record a conversation… cf. Scott Kurtz having to go through considerable contortions to record Skype calls.

Tiger & Free Software

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) contains some really neat stuff, like wxWidgets, wxPython, and wxPerl preinstalled — but man, I’m experiencing some free software lossage since I upgraded.

I had just been making good friends with the wealth of cool software in the unstable distribution of the Fink project, and, well, you can’t necessarily count on any of that compiling on 10.4. Specifically, my beloved GIMP 2.0 doesn’t compile. And I couldn’t get the XSane plugin working together with GIMP 1.2, which does compile.

Huge disappointment: JACK for OS X doesn’t work on Tiger yet. There goes a lot of great open source audio fun.

Oh well.

Free Wheeling

Free Wheeling is a piece of software created by coder and musician J.P. Mercury specifically in order to help him compose music live in the fashion which works for him.

That is so cool I can barely stand it.

He’s got a couple songs on the project page, which I really like, and a link to a bunch of his music, creative-commons licensed and housed on Archive.org.

I am in awe.

Alas, I am not on board, cause I couldn’t get it to compile on OS X. It wanted “libfreetype6,” whatever that is.