The end of an era

6 07 2009

AOL has shut down CompuServe. I was surprised that anything from CompuServe still existed… Once Netscape IPO’d, everything that was “online” and not the Internet was doomed, worthy or not. Even AOL is dead, they just haven’t incinerated the corpse yet.


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GPL-tards want to steal your work

2 07 2009

The WordPress GPL brigade is at it again, claiming WordPress Themes are derivative works that must be GPL licensed. This time they have an opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center. According to their web site:

We provide legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

According to this group of impartial lawyers with absolutely no agenda, the PHP portion of a WordPress theme must be GPL-licensed:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

This is absolutely wrong. Writing a theme or plug-in for WordPress does not require copying a single line of code, or anything derived from the code, into the theme or plug-in. Unless copyright now applies to function names and APIs, in which case the WINE and Mono people are in serious trouble.

If you don’t copy anything subject to the GPL then your work isn’t subject to the GPL. It is as simple as that. And I will back up my claim by quoting section 0, paragraph 2 of the GPL v2:

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted [...]

The GPL-tards conveniently ignore that sentence-and-a-half. In this instance they haven’t bothered citing any text from the GPL to support their ridiculous claims. They try to confuse you by talking about memory spaces, functions, and intermingling while ignoring what the GPL actually says.

I’m not against Free Software or the GPL, but I am sick of their advocates trying to abuse Free Software licenses in order to appropriate other people’s work.

Update: I do, however, fully support their decision to only promote GPL-licensed works in their themes directory. It is perfect reasonable for a Free Software project to choose not to promote non-Free works.


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Half-assed

30 06 2009

Apple continues to provide the least amount of Bluetooth support needed to trick you into buying their stuff. From the support article iPhone and iPod touch: Supported Bluetooth profiles:

iPhone and iPod touch (2nd generation) support pause, play, and stop for AVRCP

So with the nifty Kensington LiquidAUX Bluetooth that I just added to my car, I can play music with my new 3G S but I can’t skip a track without pulling it out of my pocket.

Lame.


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The answer is not Clear

24 06 2009

Joel on the failure of Clear:

At this point, and here’s the interesting part, at this point, a rational businessperson would say, “Well, does the Clear idea still make sense if we can’t actually let you skip the screening?”

OK, maybe it still makes sense to charge to skip to the front of the line. Maybe there’s a business model in that.

In that case, though, why did they still do background checks? It doesn’t make any sense.

The environment changed. It turns out that Clear’s business model of prescreening wasn’t going to be possible. But they kept doing it anyway. What kind of organizational dysfunction does it take to completely ignore the changed circumstances and keep at a money-losing business?

Except for the most frequent travelers, I don’t even think it made sense to pay just to be able to skip the line. Since the National Guard got out of the airport security business I’ve had exactly one long wait for screening and that was on a Friday evening — something perfectly predictable for the route I was flying. If you can avoid the worst travel times, and barring any airport SNAFUs, the wait for screening just isn’t that bad.

That said, with a purported 250,000+ members I don’t see how they couldn’t manage to turn a profit despite the money wasted on pointless background checks. My state requires fingerprinting, a state-level background check, and an FBI background check to issue a concealed weapons permit and those fees are much less than what Clear charged. And the issuing agency generates a surplus…


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