Not unlike the band that’s being sued, I thought it was a joke when I read that Metallica is suing a Canadian band over E, F chords:
“People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once,” stated Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. “We’re not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous. We’re just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music.”
What? Huh? Oh, come on! There’s gotta be some prior art here or something. If someone steals your song, you can sue for copyright infringement. But, to sue some small indie band because they use two chords you like just seems insane. Good thing that Metallica features prominently in Sue All The World.
Music
With the sheer volume of information coming out of blogs, I’d like my blog reader to do more to figure out what I’d be interested in reading. Bayesian classification is one tool there, and Nick Lothian has started down that road.
Technology
Charles Miller suggests forking the LGPL. He does bring up the interesting question of what license should people use in place of the LGPL? Charles suggests that we should “”visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license.”
I’m not sure how one would “visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license. If the OSI were to list “recommended” licenses for certain purposes, that might help people work through the quagmire. As Fred mentions, there are definitely good licenses in existence already.
BSD provides basically free access to do anything with the code.
Apache provides free access, but includes a clause requiring attribution.
The CPL (invented by IBM, this is the license for Eclipse and other tools) allows for commercial use and provides protection for the open source authors so that they don’t get sued.
The Mozilla Public License has a provision that requires changes to the code that comes in the Mozilla package to be released under the MPL, but does not make any such requirements of code that uses the Mozilla code base.
My guess is that MPL-type licensing is what many open source library developers want… So, I wonder what the odds are that OSI could put together a well-researched page on this topic?
Software Development
This doesn’t even really need comment… Bill Would Put Internet Song Swappers in Jail:
The Conyers-Berman bill would operate under the assumption that each copyrighted work made available through a computer network was copied by others at least 10 times for a total retail value of $2,500. That would bump the activity from a misdemeanor to a felony, carrying a sentence of up to five years in jail.
Music
USA Today has an excellent article about how Microsoft lost the city of Munich to SuSE and IBM’s Linux offering.
On May 28, the city council approved a more expensive proposal — $35.7 million — from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM, a big Linux backer.
This article really highlights the incredible marketing mistakes that Microsoft has made over the past couple of years. Increasingly, Microsoft has been using strong arm tactics with its licensing changes, right at a time when its biggest threat has far fewer licensing restrictions. The day before Munich voted, Microsoft sent a revised $23.7 million last-ditch bid to Munich. This bid was considerably lower than what SuSE and IBM were offering, but tossing out a new proposal one day before the end of a complex municipal process is not the way to win business.
In the end, Munich is paying more than Microsoft’s offer for the total contract. However, their “strategic needs” were met, and they are now in control of their upgrade and deployment cycle.
As I wrote two years ago, this kind of win for Linux was inevitable and things will continue on this track as the Software Commons becomes established.
Technology
(This entry has been revised… see below…) I’m surprised I hadn’t heard this before, but it appears that Java code that uses an LGPL’ed library must be released under the LGPL as well. Gadzooks. I’ll have to pay a bit more attention. The AspectWerkz folks convinced JMangler to switch back to the LGPL, but I guess it’s still viral!
Update: Thanks to Paul Rivers for pointing out his post in the comments for the link above. I’ve changed the title and I’m adding this text to provide more info for anyone who happens to come by here.
Using an LGPL’ed Java library does not require you to license your code under the terms of the LGPL. (Sorry about even saying that!) It does require you to follow section 6. Section 6 basically says that you must allow the customer to reverse engineer and modify your code for their own use (which is contrary to some commercial licenses). You must also distribute the source to the library (if people want it).
There is a part of section 6 about providing data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable that uses the library. The way I read this section, I don’t think it’s a problem for a typical Java-based program, but IANAL.
So, the LGPL does place some different kinds of restrictions than other licenses, but these are probably workable.
Software Development
So, the word on the street is that Netscape staffers have been slashed, which is far from surprising given AOL’s deal to include Internet Explorer for the next few years. Mozilla work continues via the Mozilla Foundation, to which AOL has pledged $2 million. Reportedly, the number of Mozilla volunteers is now exceeding the number of people who were paid by Netscape to work on it, so this could just be an interesting, new, independent phase for Moz.
Technology
Tim started a lively discussion with yesterday’s The Web’s the Place, and he’s posted some of the feedback that he’s received.
Software Development
Two good articles by Mike Hogan: Maintainability Pattern: Write less code and Maintainability Pattern: Manage Dependencies.
I heard a good analogy from some folks who do XP training near here. In a software shop, code is your inventory and it’s something to be managed well. Having vast numbers of lines of code is not necessarily something to be proud of… you want to have just the right number of lines.
Software Development
Apparently, the White House is set to project record deficits:
The White House was expected on Tuesday to forecast a record budget deficit approaching a half trillion dollars this fiscal year — $150 billion worse than its earlier projections — with little hope of a turnaround any time soon.
This is just plain awful fiscal management. Not only is it incredible that a tax cut was issued with a projected $300 billion deficit, but now we see “oops! our forecast was off by 50%”. Sure, there’s new money being spent on Iraq and such ($58 billion between Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the article), but there’s still another $100 billion that was unprojected.
In the private sector, a CEO (or at least the CFO) would be fired for something like that.
Politics
