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* Posts by dbeberman

2 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2014

Think Fortran, assembly language programming is boring and useless? Tell that to the NASA Voyager team

dbeberman

Sounds like fun!

Programming in Fortran, Assembly languages with and without Macros, small memory footprint where every bit counts, for Voyager... Sounds like fun to me:)

Remember 4K memory? Yes 4K with cores? The 8051 HDK had 256 bytes of memory and a hex keyboard to program it. 64K was a luxury. What would you do with so much memory?

Maybe Suzanne Dodd at NASA should consider crowd sourcing support for the old software. Make it open source and allow people to collaborate on any projects she needs to do. Wouldn't it be fun to be part of a NASA project in some small way?

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Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted

dbeberman
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Re: Wasn't Java suppsoed to remain "open source"

The OpenJDK is published under the GPL with Classpath Exception. In reading through the appeal ruling, although I saw the GPL mentioned at the beginning, I did not see any place where Google asserted that they used the GPL source code. Perhaps this is because they originally did not want to publish their changes to the sources as is required by the GPL.

The GPL enables derived works. It does not require compatibility of the derived works with the preceding works. The Classpath Exception enables independent libraries to be linked with the GPL code without interfering with licensing. This is identical in concept to the LGPL used by everyone running commercial applications written in C and C++ on Linux. It appears that Google did not use the OpenJDK and claim the GPL with Classpath Exception as part of its defense. My assumption is either that Google did not use the OpenJDK, or that it became available after Android was initially developed, and Google either did not switch to the OpenJDK, or did so, but was prevented from claiming the GPL during the original trial.

The OpenJDK continues to be available for anyone that wants to use it, or fork it and modify it in anyway desired under the GPL.

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