Jynnan Tonnyx

Bar graph showing relative performance of various browsers' JavaScript engines on Windows XP

Wow.

Mark Helprin writes a rather disingenuous piece in the New York Times op-ed today, arguing that Congress needs to extend copyrights again, beyond the already-obscene author’s life plus 70 years.

What if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society … to houses. Or to businesses.

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright.

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I get really irritated when pundits (usually those trying to stamp out Free Software) describe the GNU GPL as “viral” or “infectious.” You have to make a conscious decision to link your code against GPL code! You can’t get “infected” by the GPL through any means other than your own choice. If you don’t want to release your code as Free Software, go find someone else’s libraries to link against. If you want to leverage the work of thousands of other developers from around the world, you play by their rules. Period. Most software companies require you to pay money to use their library, while GPL code developers require you to share and share alike. If you don’t like it, that’s fine - go create your own software ecosystem. But quit trying to convince the world that the GPL is bad just because you don’t like its terms.

It’s kind of fun to see old (but good) ideas about usability and feature bloat return to the forefront in a product. Those of us who remember the night-and-day difference between the Macintosh and MS-DOS (or even Windows 3.1) think of this as axiomatic - that the software should get out of your way as much as possible, and just let you do what you’re trying to do. Read more…

I know I’m beating this thing to death, especially since nobody who drops by my site much cares, but here’s a few more items about everyone’s favorite Linux trash-talker.

The case, and SCO’s continued assertions that black is white, up is down, and that software licenses can’t give users the right to copy, is starting to make the mainstream press. Ed Quillen of the Denver Post wrote this column today. Funny, I’ve been making pretty much the same arguments since Disney first bought the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act in 1996. Read more…

If you’re like me, you are behind a crazy-restrictive firewall, that only allows outbound traffic through a web proxy. Occasionally, I have need of non-release software, like the latest CVS source from the ant-contrib project. The stupid thing is, the latest CVS packages don’t include proxy support. After hours of searching, I finally found an old patch by Andy Piper and Jim Kingdon that added HTTP proxy capabilities, but it wouldn’t work against the latest sources. So I spent a few hours hacking it into the latest release (1.12.1).

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Trying to make sense of the SCO vs. the World battle currently raging is complicated for many reasons. First of all, the company now known as SCO is the amalgamation of two companies, Caldera and SCO. The code they own comes from AT&T Bell Labs by way of both SCO and Novell. GNU/Linux is made up of software from two projects as well - the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation and the Linux kernel created by Linus Torvalds. Now throw in the fact that UNIX is a trademark owned by the Open Group, and the whole BSD saga, and things are really messed up.

Here’s my attempt to simplify things by changing the names to protect the innocent.
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The SCO Group, formerly Caldera Linux Systems International, has upped its strident tones as it marches headlong into oblivion. It would be funny if they weren’t trying to take GNU/Linux with them. This time, they are stopping all sales of SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products (the products that gave them the money to buy SCO Group to begin with), and they’ve even taken the unusual step of threatening their own customers, who bought the software in good faith from them. Read more…