nixternal

…and READ THIS.

Just so everyone knows, the quote by Mark Shuttleworth was horribly used and misrepresented by the so-called writer. Also bare in mind that the owner of this website is Ziff Davis, which just happens to receive gobs of money from Microsoft for advertising and providing reviews on their products with a high rating every time. Even though it is a Linux news site, you know where some of their operating cash comes from.

…and today this image.

Yesterday Linspire announced their deal with Microsoft. Of course which many of you know, but today I wanted to read their forums to see what people had to say, and on my way in I saw that image. I truthfully find it distasteful, as I am sure you probably know why. 4 partners, 3 of them proprietary in their ways, bunched together with one that holds a free and open source software philosophy. To me it looks like Ubuntu supports all of those partnerships just by a single image. I know that isn’t true, but do the people who go to that website know that?

This is disturbing, and what I find appalling is that Kevin thinks that his deal with Microsoft will provide a “Better Linux.” How? WTF can a Microsoft deal do that will make Linux better? Take off the cloudy glasses already.

EDIT: Strike my P.S. to Mark for a reply. It seems he is currently traveling and to prevent any unneeded unrest, I am removing my P.S. to Mark, as I am sure he will respond in due time.

So, the next time one of you distros talk to the devil himself, Steve Ballmer, tell him I said to kiss my free arse!

So Kevin, did you tell him? Everyone who commented in my post about GPLv3…The death of Linux, we were right!!!

It seems that Linspire struck up a deal with the devil. One week to the day that Kevin from Linspire posted his whole “GPLv3 is a evil choice restricting license” remarks, he signs the ever-so-famous deals we have been hearing about with Microsoft. Didn’t see that one coming did we? Hell ya we did, 27 comments to my last post, most flaming me and the GPL I am sure, but there were a few who stated the obvious. Take Enny for instance:

sigh, so much FUD, and no less from the CEO of a distro and his forum moderators. Much like the GPLv3 FUD in the media too.

I am not surprised if Linspire has already signed a deal with MS, like Xandros went to Microsoft in November 2006 (and obstensibly modified the terms to exclude coupons after GPLv3 went after that). They did it before when they had a lock tight court case with Lindows, didn’t they?

DEAD F’N ON! Thanks goes to Jucato for telling me “I called it” last week, even though I had no clue what he was talking about. Hey Ballmer, if you got the goods, come sign a deal with me! I hope this doesn’t cause all kinds of hell with Canonical and Ubuntu due to previous relationships that were agreed upon.

Hey everyone…first off I have to apologize for a simple mistake. I had no idea that the nixforce site was also hosting advertisement. I use Konqueror, the greatest browser in the world, and I have ad blocking turned on, so I don’t see all those Ad Sense ads by Google. That was what fueled my previous post in a way.

Also, after further discussion with Jordan Mantha, it is now clear that just because something doesn’t have a license or copyright doesn’t mean it IS in the public domain. Now some countries don’t support this idea, however the US does, and the server that nixforce.com is on is in the US. So the owner is therefor in violation of copyright laws (I think?) unless of course you hold a license that states otherwise (copyleft unrestricted).

See, I thought this site wasn’t selling advertisement because I didn’t see it. And therefor didn’t have any issues with it. I still don’t know if I have issues with it. You can view the stats for the server and see it is probably just us who are viewing it anyways So I apologize because I in fact did not see the violations, they were blocked I guess you can say, by Ad Blocker and possibly my lack of knowledge in this field. But hey, if I didn’t post this, I still wouldn’t know, so thanks for the input in the comments on my previous post. God public humiliation is awesome.

P.S. I still don’t support sending someone a DMCA cease-and-desist order.

EDIT: Heh, I made another booboo, my talk with Jordan made me realize that if it doesn’t contain a copyright, doesn’t mean it IS in the public domain. I am full of booboo’s today…I will blame that on using Visual Studio .NET for my homework (ASP.NET) due tonight :p

This kills me…We all come together with one common goal and that is to advocate the use of free software. We enjoy our freedoms, we advocate our freedoms, we love our freedoms. GPL, BSD, MIT oh my!

Yet…when someone aggregates a blog in the freedom world, people get upset as they didn’t give them permissions. I understand people getting upset, but I just don’t get it…

We support projects like Defective by Design and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and we stand together against things like DRM, the RIAA, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And then…all of a sudden out of nowhere, DMCA take down notices are filed. WHAT?

The DMCA has been criticized for making it too easy for copyright owners to encourage website owners to take down infringing content and links when it may not in fact be infringing. When website owners receive a takedown notice it is in their interest not to challenge it, even if it is not clear if infringement is taking place, because if the potentially infringing content is taken down the website will not be held liable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation senior IP attorney Fred von Lohmann has said this is one of the problems with the DMCA. - Quoted from WikiPedia’s page on DMCA

Is it just me, or are these acts hypocritical? There are sites that aggregate the feeds from the various planets (Debian, KDE, Ubuntu, GNOME, and more) and provide them in a blog like fashion. Out of the 4 planets I just listed, Debian is the only one that doesn’t carry a disclaimer or copyright notice. I am not a lawyer, but I thought works that were on the Internet without any such disclaimer or copyright notice were in fact public domain? If someone is aggregating a planet without such clauses, would that make the posts on that planet public domain?

The licenses I use for this blog are GPL on the theme and GFDL on the content and documentation. I know that since the posts on my site are of my opinion, that places invariant sections within the GFDL license for this site. All that means is a person cannot change my views or opinions if they regurgitate what is said on this blog. If someone wants to aggregate my blog and possibly put it out to more people, I am all for it. They are spreading my advocation of freedom, therefor making my job a little easier in getting information out to the masses. Like I stated previously, if someone is aggregating my blog and not disrespecting the copyleft license agreements, and making money off of it, good on them. Although when I had AdSense on my blog, 7 people in 1 year clicked on the ads, making me a whopping $0.00.

What is the difference between someone aggregating your blog or someone finding it via Google anyways? One way or the other they are going to find your information. If you subscribe your posts to a planet, you are putting your posts out in the public in the first place. If you don’t want your blog syndicated, I suggest you remove the RSS feeds from the site.

Well, the past 14 or so hours I went on a bug rampage. I was able to close over a 100 bugs, most of which were stale, fix released, or support type reports. I confirmed a ton, wishlisted a ton, created a ton of upstream bug reports, and knocked down the national deficit while I was at it

This is a cool utility that Carthik has put together. Take a look at all of the trendlines, but one, and look at the drops reported. I got on a roll, became somewhat addicted, and went into the zone, and now the KDE-PIM package is happy I worked on it.

Tomorrow if I get some time, there are still quite a few kdebase and kdelibs reports I want to go over, as well as some of the other KDE apps. Well, that is all the bragging I have in me tonight, so off to bed I go…

Good night ladies and gents!