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OneAndOneIs2
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Wed, Jul 25, 2007
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A GPL v3 killer?
I see Intel has just released the previously-commercial-only Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under GPL v2.
And this has reminded me of the complications Qt has brought up being v2-only, and it suddenly occurred to me that there's a way MS could bring a really sneaky anti-v3 strategy to bear.
MS has a number of proprietary things that the FOSS world would like to get inter-operable. The NTFS file system. The Office formats. Etc. etc. And the EU has been nagging at them to release interoperability information for ages.
Since MS seems to really dislike GPL v3, they could solve a lot of their problems with a simple move: Release all the code necessary to get interoperability under Linux working. Under GPL v2 only.
Take Samba. Samaba is going GPL v3-only. If MS released some significantly-big v2-patches for the last v2 version that resulted in much better Linux-Windows networking compatibility, a lot of people would use the MS-patched version of Samba: Most end users are more concerned with how well software works than with which license it's released under.
That would leave the Samba team with two choices: Stick with GPL v3 and have a less-popular, less-functional fork of their own software. Or cave in and go back to GPL v2 so they can take advantage of the GPL'd code from MS.
And either way, MS would be able to show to concerned parties, such as the EU antitrust people, that they have finally released the code that the FOSS people have been demanding, under the single most popular FOSS license in use.
That being the case, I think we should look with deep cynicism at any sudden code releases from Microsoft over the coming months... Despite it being a real chore to take code and turn it into a specification that can be used for a clean-room implementation, it would probably be worth doing.
6 comments
Besides, I posted the solution as well, didn't I? :P
Computer software contains knowledge about how to solve a particular set of problems. If MS licensed their software under GPL2, all the Samba developers have to do is study how MS solved their problems. After learning about the program's knowledge, the Samba team would have all the information they would need to implement their own software that they would license under GPL3.
So therefore, the Samba team would have a third choice, learn the knowledge contained within the GPL2 MS software and implement their own software.
If only it WERE that easy.
Well-written, well-documented code contains all the necessary information to write a spec, and then write new code from that spec.
However, code can also be written that makes it very hard to work out the spec: Magic numbers, spaghetti logic, lack of commenting... code can be written in such a way as to make it almost impossible to understand without documentation.
At the very least, such "poison pill" code could be released by MS that would take a long enough time to reverse-engineer and recode that the official Samba project would always be months behind.
There's a rumour that the networking coders at MS actually use Samba's documentation because it's the only decent source of information they can find. If the people with full access to the code and the spec. can't easily understand it, how would Samba's coders stand a chance?
On the other hand, GPLv3 is even undesirable for FOSS programmers like Linus Torvalds and the Linux 'core' team.
I always keep saying: beat MS with better sofware, not with license, black magic or voodoo. Period.
[1] http://tinyurl.com/2oqody
>If the people with full access to the code and the spec. can't easily understand it, how would Samba's coders stand a chance?
I know the process of trying to understand spaghetti logic and magic numbers is non-trivial, but seriously, the Samba developers don't need to reimplement the entire SMB protocol from scratch. They can make an effort in understanding the logic of the features that they don't have.
Also, if the programmers of the SMB code do not understand their own code, how does anybody expect them to do any changes to the code? If it is truly that horrible, it would make so much more sense to refactor it than maintain hack after hack.
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So Friday (last) started out so well, I knew it was going to be an awesome day.
I slept in (ahhh, bliss) and went for a morning walk to mail some....er...mail (because, seriously, what else can you mail? turtles?) and it was sunny and warm and I hadn't had any caffeine yet so I got myself a Slurpee. Nothing says awesome Summer day like a 10 am Coke Slurpee cooling you down in the sun.
But do you know what really tipped the morning into full-blown awesomeness? The two shirtless, amazingly hot guys who jogged past me, sweaty and gorgeous as I walked home. Ahhhhh, sugar, sun, and sexy, my own personal Summer trifecta.
I went over to where C-Dawg was staying and picked her up (so there would be no driving necessary) and we came back to my apartment, poured ourselves a summer-worthy drink and headed out on the town.
We wandered through downtown, people watching and talking and laughing and window shopping and then we headed to one of the local patios and ordered up a pitcher and some appetizers.
And that's when the real fun began.
You see, C-Dawg and I love people watching. And more than that, we love making up little stories about people and trying to guess who they are. We'd soon discovered that Friday would have to be known as "Everyone Looks Familiar Day" because I kept on seeing people that I thought looked familiar but I couldn't tell if they actually were or if I was just imagining it.
We decided that the couple next to us had just boated in on their yacht and that the guys across from us were all discussing their volleyball league's last game.
We also tried to narrow down which men C felt were too young for me and which she deemed "just right." Once we'd narrowed my age-group down to a ten year span she tested me to see if I could actually tell which guys were ok and which were in the "are you crazy, he's way too young" category.
I did not do well at this. (sigh)
As the pitcher got emptied, a table behind us became filled with a bunch of guys. C-Dawg, needing to "get out of the sun" (which we're pretty sure the guys could tell was an obvious ploy for her to be able to stare at the guys instead of having to pretend to look around and can I just say thank goodness for sunglasses and how easy they make it to check out cute guys?) sat next to me and we started to figure out the back story for these guys.
Later, C decided to choose which of the guys she'd set me up with and when she did she very kindly me that I could go out with the nice, sweet, geeky one because I'm a geek too at which point I protested until she promised she was a geek as well and it wasn't a bad thing. (Strangely enough I know what she means.)
At one point, the waiter came over and there'd been this on-going joke between the three of us because servers kept on trying to bring us food we hadn't ordered and I kept on making this dumb joke about it and then when C-Dawg told me the joke was getting old and the waiter laughed, I turned to him and said (and I quote) "Hey, I'm just going to keep saying it because it never be's not funny!"
At which point he suggested that this wasn't our first patio of the evening and I couldn't stop laughing because I couldn't believe I'd said "be's" and how as I'd said it it had TOTALLY been a word.
Ahhh alcohol, what silly things you do to my brain.
We hit up a few more places after that and went for dinner at my favourite place and then watched an awesomely bad movie back at my place. (Hi, I'm Victoria and I'm going to say the word 'place' as many times as possible in one sentence. I are a good writer.)
It was pretty darn awesome and I'm sure there's more I can think of, like how she wet-willied a statue and how she almost convinced me to give nice geek guy my number and how we sat outside the best ice cream place in town and convinced a bunch of other people that yes, they really should go inside and get a cone.
A good day, a great afternoon, a fun evening. It always be's like that with the C-Dawg. I can't wait til we get to do it again.30/07/10 - It Never Be's
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