gpl category archive

GNU/Solaris and GPLv3

I found an interesting article at The Register yesterday, “Is ‘GNU/Solaris’ emerging from the Microsoft-Novell deal?” It would be awesome if Sun released the Solaris kernel under the GPLv3, because I think that would be a chance to observe differences between idealistic and pragmatic approaches to free software.

Looking around, I see Linux Today picked up the story, and in comments there I found out there are already projects in progress around an existing free/open Solaris, including OpenSolaris.org and the Nexenta Operating System, which combines GNU with OpenSolaris. But OpenSolaris is based on Sun’s CDDL, and not the GPL, which I strongly prefer.

Why am I writing on these matters of which I know very little? Because …

Review: Linus Torvalds, ‘Just for Fun’

Just for FunLinus Torvalds

Welcome to my inaugural minimalist review. I recently finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. “The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” Now it’s time to blurt out a few comments.

(Remember: minimalist may refer to the small amount of substantive content rather than the word count. As often happens, I may have hidden some catchier stuff at the end: Pragmatism, Idealism, and Revolution.)

I have mixed feelings about doing reviews. Who am I to criticize anything? Well, I’m certainly not especially qualified, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion, right?

I enjoyed the book. I like …

Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I’m trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service is very positive. The only problem I’ve had is that images don’t show up in the feed anymore, because I’m using relative paths and they need to be absolute. (That was most noticeable at first. I’ve since realized that internal links were broken also.)

I contacted FeedBurner support and I think Matt Shobe must have been responding to me even before I clicked the “submit” button, as if they have …