Category: Open Source

Jon Udell:

Text is code, code is data, data is text.

CNet:

SAN JOSE, Calif.–To encourage the broadest possible support for its forthcoming “Storage Tank” technology, IBM will release an open-source version of the software needed to let servers tap into the next-generation storage system.

Big Blue is working with an undisclosed open-source group on the software and will release the code when the product is generally available in 2003, said David Pease, manager of storage software at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and leader of the 5-year-old Storage Tank project. In addition, IBM plans to publish the communication method fundamental to the next-generation storage project.

Thank you to Richard Stallman for getting back to me:

I expect that most of these licenses are incompatible with the GPL, but they said they would not recommend their licenses for software, so compatibility with the GPL should not really matter much in practice.

Firebird 1.02, is available to download.  1.02 is a bugfix/maintenance release of the open source database program.

ksLogger:

ksLogger is ‘yet another Java logging package’. 🙂 To be honest, I don’t even know what’s out there. But I do know that ksLogger is small (<10KB jar file) and has a couple of neato features. Let’s go through the features shall we?

Version 1.01 is out.  Here are the changes:

There are three new methods for determining the current log level: isWarn(), isInfo(), and isDebug(). Each method returns true if the log level is greater than or equal to the desired level. For example, if the log level is currently set to INFO, then isWarn() and isInfo() will return true, and isDebug() will return false.

It looks to be pretty lightweight and only JDK/JRE >=1.3.  Of course the defacto logging standard is Jakarta’s Log4J, but sometimes you’re looking for that lighter weight alternative solution.

Lawrence Lessig weighs in on CC for software licenses:

Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. The answer is that they won’t. We share RMS’s concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. Our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. For now, at least.

I’m going to take that as an authoritative answer.  Unfortunately, CC licenses are already being applied to software.  The cat’s out of the bag.  What do we do now?

Decklin Foster sent me an email this morning:

The GPL says that you can’t add any additional restrictions when distributing a derived work. So, while “attribution + share alike” would be compatible, anything involving “no derivs” or “non-commercial” would be incompatible with the GPL. Even if the CC license allowed you to add more restrictive terms (I haven’t read it), you would still end up with something not legally distributable, because the GPL’ed parts would no longer give you permission to distribute them under the GPL.

The BSD/MIT license explicitly grants you the right to sublicence without stating any restrictions, so there is no problem here. (nb: while the BSD license is “attribution”, old-style 3-clause BSD license is “attribution + put my name on all your advertising materials”, which makes software licensed under such terms GPL-incompatible.) BSD-licensed software is GPL-compatible because (a) you can add any terms you want to the BSD’ed parts, and (b) the restrictions of the BSD license are a subset of those stated in the GPL.

Somehow I missed it yesterday, but Kenneth Hunt pointed to the R Project for Statistical Computing.  It looks like a damn powerful little package.

Phillip sheds some light on my Creative Commons as software licensing question:

IMHO the GPL is “attribution + share alike”, and the BSD/MIT licenses are “attribution”. They’re just somewhat better understood for software. Any combination of “attribution” and “share alike” should be GPL-compatible.

Cool.  I was thinking that the creative commons licenses should be GPL comptible at least in theory, but I was curious about what other people thought.  More speculations are welcome, of course.

Sam Ruby has some insight this morning:

The key difference between by-sa and GPL is one of marketing genious.

Had Jon merely copyrighted his work, you could have copied it had you asked for and obtained Jon’s permission.  All Jon has done is let you know in advance under what conditions you are not even required to ask.

…When you skip the intermediaries.

OSNews:

CRM wrote in to tell us that the folks at Distrowatch have tried Slackware on for size. The review can be found in its entirety here. Conclusions are not surprising: impressive, stable distro, but if you like bells and whistles, stay away.

Slackware.  Lots of floppy disks.  I miss those days.

Andy Oliver makes the case for Gump:

So now you fix the nags as they happen, you know when major dependency breaks happen… Whoa…what are you going to do durring that integration phase? Buy Sam Ruby a beer and thank him.

The last time I messed with Gump was before I read Erik and Steve’s awesome Java Development with Ant.  I need to play with Gump again in my “spare time,” as it would definately help me keep up with bleeding edge stuff in a fairly easy way.  I love how the entire java-based apache universe builds in just over an hour.

Carlos Perez discusses the Eclipse microkernel used in other projects, particularly JLense.

Arch Linux, an i686-optimized Linux distro, released version 0.4 (Dragon) today.  Coverage comes from Judd Vinet’s Advogato diary, PCLinuxOnlone, and Freshmeat.  Arch Linux 0.4 is built using GCC3.2 with other tweaks and bugfixes.