Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

I wonder how many commentards have read the Apache licence. As far as I can make out from it, unlike the early BSD permissive licences, there's no requirement to to credit the author(s) but there is a term against applying their trademarks. That might be seen as an inhibiting crediting authors.

I might have misread it, of course, so I'm open to correction.

Re: Idiot

Or decided that 1 billion was enough for anyone and retired long ago.

"Money – we know the TDF is trying to find ways to finance the project"

Quite. And even more ironically, it's the nature of their licence that makes it difficult to do that. No wonder they're looking at OO and shouting "sour grapes".

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

Stealing is taking with intent to deprive the owner of it and without the owner's permission. Basing a commercial product on a permissive licensed one in no way deprives the world of the original version. I don't know about current windows but earlier versions used, and, in keeping with the licence, acknowledged they used, the BSD networking stack. That in no way prevented the same stack being used in other OSs.

If someone contributes to a permissive project they presumably do that in full knowledge of the possibility of someone basing a commercial product with it so the commercial product has the contributors' consent. The commercial product might be feeding back changes to the product. It might even fund the entire product.

On neither basis can the accusation of stealing stick. The only difference is that the permissive project can be shared in binary without any obligation to provide source code. Even then there's only a real difference if the commercial version has made changes that aren't fed back. And what's at issue here is one project forking a permissive project and making changes that can't be fed back due to the difference in licensing terms. If you want to consider a commercial closed version as stealing from the original project then you must surely apply the same label to the fork under the more restrictive licence.

From the PoV of the original project it's just sharing, as the licence facilitates but don't you think it just a little ill-mannered, to put it no stronger, to take the freely shared code from an original project, ensure that your changes can't be shared back and then claim some sort of moral high ground over the project from which you've taken it?

Re: "We were caught quite off guard"

"They should get over themselves, switch licences so that a merge is possible."

Easier said than done. They'd have to get agreement from all contributors.

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

This can't be done for the same reason that OO can't take the MPL contributions. The MPL contains copyleft clauses similar to GPL, i.e. projects using such source, including any forks, must also be copyleft. The Apache licence is permissive and doesn't put any such constraints on code taken from it. It may seem unfair that LO could take the OO code freely and not give back but that's the difference between the two licences. Yes, it's ironic - or something - that the copyleft principle is intended to force code sharing whilst permissive licences simply facilitate it.

Re: It's just me who doesn't qualify.

Seriously I'm a bit too old to be affected but equally seriously it could be significant for the younger generation.

Re: you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned?

Not sure of the date but it must be after mid '70s as our children qualified.

Re: It's almost as if

As I remember it the plan for Leave was to let Cameron deal with it because he'd foolishly said he would. Having discovered that the result actually was Leave he did the sensible thing and bailed. That left Leave scouring the woods for unicorns. Come January we'll discover whether they found any.

Re: Awww, kids today...

"The passport control actually checked that I looked like my photograph."

But you got out eventually?

Re: Bye lads....

"if the Brexit talks to pear shaped"

Were they ever going to be any other shape? HMG deliberately put themselves in the position of supplicants and then want to dictate terms.

I think one comment was that they were more likely to hear something sensible from the sand than from the government.

Re: Latest from the PM

"This is cargo culting at its worst."

But without cargo.

Re: CUPS sucks

"You can run practically every Windows software"

That's everything that Windows supports which might not be some older hardware. Windows has form for this.

I see you found a couple of people with no experience of serious proofreading.

Until the current unpleasantness (and hopefully again once the good times roll) I produce weekly hand-outs form my wife's patchwork class. Following online notes on a laptop, even assuming there was a connection in the hall the class was held in, whilst sewing wasn't going to work too well. These days we email out a PDF which the class members will need to print, especially as they'll need to cut out the templates from it.

Re: Alternate reality

That's the thing about peacocks. You see them strutting about and never image they were aerodynamically capable of flight until your eardrums get assaulted by one perched in a tree above your head.

Re: Alternate reality

"if the cows break into my garden"

IME that's because a townie has followed attempted to follow a footpath into the wrong field and left a gate open because there wasn't a stile.

Actually, that's sheep. The cow problem was when the farmer used to walk a milking herd back home along the road. Fortunately dairying isn't profitable at his scale so it doesn't happen now. We did have as much of the herd as would fit, including the bull that always accompanied them, in the drive, milling round the cars. The farmer even got worried that time.

Re: Tip for those sacked

Two conflicting points of view, both excellent in their own way.

Some data is definitely hybrid. Any email from company to worker relevant to employment and copies of similar emails going the other way are both company and personal data. Depending on your relationship with your employer you may need your own copy. I'm sure it's a grey area of law. OTOH if the communication had been on paper there'd probably have been no question of the employee being forbidden to retain it.

Then there's general knowledge - all those accumulated little code snippets or scripts that an employer expects an experienced techie to have at his finger tips. Does it all have to be in the head or can some of it be preserved in some other form? And I'm sure every old-school salesman had his little black book or card index which went with him from employer to employer. In either case the employer can't expect the leaver to be brainwashed.

Re: Seems reasonable

"but are we paranoid enough?"

If you're not your manglement will discover that the hard way. They won't blame themselves. Oh, no.

The career of a teacher is probably longer than that of an active dancer. If they all went into teaching there'd be more teachers than dancers.

Re: Those raising issue at the outrage.

"Indeed, you can take a pension early from that job."

I wonder how much actual pension they can have built up before they need to retire. I doubt there are enough teaching and choreography jobs to move into.

"Skilled technical specialists don't get paid more, the computer software used to decide the pay rate for a job seems to mark specialist skills down - that's not just in IT, that's across all specialisms."

Unsurprisingly nothing seems to have changed since the 1980s. Promotion from SSO to PSO depended on responsibility but that was defined as management responsibility. The fact that in my speciality there was the individual responsibility for giving evidence that might put someone away for life didn't count.

I bailed, went into IT and the money started going up and up. I think it came as a slight shock to my former employers but from what I heard, not enough to do anything useful. However, entirely coincidentally, I was offered the promotion to PSO without any of the normal procedures as soon as I handed in my notice.