tag archive: gpl

An objection I’ve had to many programming books and web sites is that they don’t make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

A writer of instructional material may be doing so to earn some money, but I hope he or she is also motivated by the desire to help others. I think the best authors and teachers are motivated strongly by this desire. And if this is the case, I think it reasonably follows that the author of a programming work should want their students to be able to freely use their source code in the students’ own creations.

I was happy to exchange words recently with an author who was open and responsive to making his sample code available under a free license. With tomorrow being Software Freedom Day, it seemed like a good time …

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 I’ve run in to some interesting reading about the GPLv3 debate over the past few days, and it gets me thinking about the reasons I’m trying to move to …

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 a support time machine to be extra responsive. He pointed out I should use absolute paths to fix that. But! But! That would be painful — …