Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread Jonathan M Davis
kretinis wrote:

> I accept Shoos implementation only with the conditions
> 
> 1) No multiplication, division and remainder operations are allowed. Tango
> used these operations for date calculation in an original way. All similar
> uses are forbidden.
> 
> 2) Also it is not allowed to implement routines for operations at (1).
> That would be obviously a thinly veiled attempt at stealing Tango code.
> 
> 3) No use of the words date, time, and calendar are allowed in the code or
> the documentation. These words were used creatively by Tango. They cannot
> be stolen.
> 
> I am sure these requirements are reasonable

LOL. I've never used Tango, so I don't know how its time/date code does 
things, let alone if there's anything original about it. But requiring date 
or time code to not use the words date, time, or calendar? That's like 
saying that code which uses an int can't use the word integer or number. 
It's just plain silly. I sincerely hope that you're not being serious.

Honestly, I don't see any problem with copying APIs as long as they're 
solid, and you don't look at the actual code. However, it does seem that in 
this case, at least, it's best to just do something different with phobos 
and avoid conflict on the matter. There are plenty of different useful ways 
which date and time code can be done, and basing it on a pre-existing, major 
library such as boost (which is what Andrei is doing IIRC) seems to me to be 
a reasonable solution.

- Jonathan M Davis


Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread Moritz Warning
On Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:33:13 -0400, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> I want to first qualify that I represent only myself, nobody from
> Phobos, nobody from Tango, not Walter nor Andrei nor Kris nor Lars nor
> SHOO nor anyone but me.
> 
[..]
> 
> I also extend Tango an invitation to use any of my code from Phobos,
> druntime, or dcollections and relicense it under their license.  I have
> no problem with people using my code, as long as I can also use it as I
> see fit.
thx!

I understand your sentiments.

As for me, Tango doesn't look harmful and
I contribute small stuff here and there
(as many other ppl do).
It's helpful to focus community efforts.
(Phobos got better in this regards lately)

As for this unfortunate issue,
it's time to move on.



Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread Moritz Warning
On Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:10:31 +, kretinis wrote:

> == Quote from Steven Schveighoffer (schvei...@yahoo.com)'s article
[..]
> 
> I accept Shoos implementation only with the conditions
[..]
> I am sure these requirements are reasonable

Your arguments are futile, explanation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K83gqiRd2XI


Re: Bartosz' Message Passing talk tonight

2010-06-10 Thread Walter Bright

Phil Deets wrote:
The website has a new post for a June meeting now, but there is no date 
or time posted. I e-mailed the contact e-mail address about this, but I 
got a delivery failure notification so the address must be out of date. 
Does anybody know when the June meeting is?


Here's the announcement for the June meeting. I plan on attending, I think it'll 
be fun. Of course, it will be great to see there as many of our D community as 
can come! (Afterwards, we go out for a drink & some food at the local watering 
hole.)


===
Next week Gavriel Plotke will be talking about the harnessing of the
power of the graphics chip as a massively parallel supercomputer that
sits, mostly idly (uless we play a lot of games, that is), inside most
computers.

Title: Massive Multithreading on the GPU. GigaFlops or...  TeraFlops?

Speaker: Gavriel Plotke, Microsoft Senior SDET

Date: Wednesday, June 16the

Place: Microsoft Eastside Campus, Bldg 41, Townsend (see our website
www.nwcpp.org for directions).

Abstract:

The modern GPU is a massively parallel supercomputer that has 2 orders
of magnitude more processing power then a single CPU Core. But the
threading model is very different than the CPU. Don't get left behind
on knowing about this different paradigm.

Bio:
I've been with Microsoft for 3 years on the DirectX High Level Shader
Language compiler test team. I've been a champion of the new Compute
Shader features of DirectX11. While I have some graphics background,
it was my assembler language and compiler writing background that got
me the job.  Early in my career I worked on the internals of a
mainframe spreadsheet product as a competitor to VisiCalc and
Lotus123.  It was a time when everyone in a big office would have a
mainframe terminal and no one had a PC.  It was a great product, but
time moved on, and Excel on inexpensive PCs ate our lunch. After that
I spent a many years doing business contract work - different
projects, different platforms, lots of database design.  Now I help
support programming on today's supercomputer, the modern graphics
card.


Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread Ali Çehreli

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> To reiterate what someone else said, to me Tango is poison.  It appears
> to me from SHOO's story that just *using* Tango is poison. I feel like
> all the contributions I have made (and the other two authors have made)
> are being held hostage for no good reason (I still don't know why).  I
> stand by my decision to leave that project, and I hope this story has at
> least given you an idea of why.
>
> I also extend Tango an invitation to use any of my code from Phobos,
> druntime, or dcollections and relicense it under their license.  I have
> no problem with people using my code, as long as I can also use it as I
> see fit.
>
> -Steve
>
> P.S., I will not respond to this thread except to make any
> clarifications/corrections.  I've said my share.

Thank you very much for the detailed summary and all of your 
contributions to the D community.


Ali

P.S. For the record, I have never used, installed, or looked at Tango 
code. Once, I did follow a link to their online documentation which had 
been pointed out to be very good and useful. I had agreed.


Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread godobject
Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

> So to answer some questions/comments stated a few months ago:
> 
> > have you thought about just asking the authors of the Tango code in 
> > question?
> 
> No, I hadn't, but I did.  Kris says no (comment).

What's the problem? If you can't use his code, write your own. Stop 
complaining. It's unproductive.

> > I would imagine they would say that they only see a minor resemblance in 
> > the api and asking wouldn't even be necessary from their point of view.
> 
> I guess your imagination was incorrect.  I don't know why, but Kris does  
> not want a non-infringing reimplementation of Tango's time code in Phobos.

Why should he? He has invested much time on Tango and Tango was much better. 
Phobos was rebuild from scratch because of serious NIH syndrome by some 
weirdos. You're enforcing your stupid 'better than thou' attitude with the crap 
Boost license. The real work was already done. Your only contribution will be 
to spread the stupid intellectual property propaganda (attribution clause FUD). 
You can't beat the old work technically.

> "Even if you have good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important  
> to know this, there may be less forgiving actors out there."
> 
> I guess I found one.

Yes you did.

> P.S., I will not respond to this thread except to make any  
> clarifications/corrections.  I've said my share.

Good.


Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread SHOO

(2010/06/10 23:33), Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

I want to first qualify that I represent only myself, nobody from
Phobos, nobody from Tango, not Walter nor Andrei nor Kris nor Lars nor
SHOO nor anyone but me.

Please see this message:

http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-June/000783.html

Quoted here completely for convenience:

Walter Bright wrote:

"Although I do not believe that SHOO's work on the date/time is legally
infringing on Tango's time code, I feel there's been enough bad feeling
about this and that we should not include Tango's time api design in
Phobos.

I apologize to SHOO for this. I know this is unfair to him.

Andrei has given a start to std.gregorian, perhaps SHOO's implementation
work can be transferred to this to help complete it?"

--

So I want to re-stress some points I have made in the past, and respond
to some statements that have been made by others.

First, let's recap what happened. According to SHOO, he was a user of
Tango's time library, and used the online documentation of Tango, and
the existing implementation of Phobos to write a new Phobos-ified time
library that was similar to Tango's api. Having been one of the main
authors of Tango's time package, I examined SHOO's implementation
side-by-side with Tango's, I can say that I believe him. IMO, it's not
the same code or even derived, it just has a similar feel.

Someone from Tango was alerted to this, and considered it to be
infringing to the point where he/she called Walter and told him so.
Walter, as someone who wants nothing to do with controversy and possible
legal issues, refused to accept the code based on this accusation. Note:
I was not a part of this call, so I do not know what was said exactly in
it, these are my interpretations of the posts on the newsgroup.

Lars of Tango wrote a message to the Phobos mailing list indicating that
in his opinion, "claiming a clean room implementation of an API in D is
difficult, if for no other reason that it is (due to imperfect doc
generation etc) somewhat difficult to properly study a D API without at
the same time reading the source (or glimpsing at it). Even if you have
good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important to know this,
there may be less forgiving actors out there." You can read the entire
message here:
http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-April/000370.html

Coupled with the phone call asking Walter to block the code, at this
point, we could just say that Tango was being careful. But under the
circumstances, it appears to me that Tango is under the impression that
simply admitting one has used Tango, combined with having made a library
inspired by Tango's API, is enough to warrant an accusation of
infringement. I don't even know if anyone from Tango examined the code
or not.

Thus ensued a large discussion (to phrase it politely) in which several
good ideas for resolving the problem came to light. Some of them focused
on getting a boost license for Tango's time code. It was revealed that
one of the authors, John Chapman, was not reachable by the Tango team,
and so it would take some time to get John's permission. After a few
days, I took it upon myself to seek out John and get his input. He
responded to me positively, and indicated he would alert the Tango team.
If we count the four authors listed in the Tango code (I'm somewhat
convinced that a 5th author does not exist), that meant that both John
and I had agreed to license the time code under the boost license for
Phobos. This left two authors.

Out of respect for Tango's ownership of the situation, I let it sit for
over a week, expecting at any time that someone from Tango would contact
Walter with good news. Having heard nothing, I decided to push the
matter a little further and post to the newsgroup my success with John.
An indication from Moritz Warning, a Tango user, was that he had spoken
with the remaining two authors: "I have asked Kris Bell and Matti
Niemenmaa. No Problem at all."

This left the infamous 2nd gunma... I mean 5th author. After requests
for who this person was on the newsgroup, I got nothing.

Almost two weeks later, I decided to give up temporarily on the 5th
author, if the other two were OK with it, I could get more leverage to
finding out who that 5th person was. I just wanted to make sure I had a
direct statement from both those authors, as hearsay isn't very good
evidence. After posing the question to Moritz, Matti Niemenmaa posted
his approval of the license change on the newsgroup. (A sincere thank
you for that!)

Which leads us to Kris. Apparently, Kris has no comment. Having no
comment in this issue is equivalent to saying no without sounding like
you are saying no. Because a unanimous 'yes' vote is required to change
things, abstaining means things will stay the way they are. That's an
interesting way to go...

So to answer some questions/comments stated a few months ago:


have you thought about just asking the authors of the Tango code
in

Re: SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread kretinis
== Quote from Steven Schveighoffer (schvei...@yahoo.com)'s article
> I want to first qualify that I represent only myself, nobody from Phobos,
> nobody from Tango, not Walter nor Andrei nor Kris nor Lars nor SHOO nor
> anyone but me.
> Please see this message:
> http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-June/000783.html
> Quoted here completely for convenience:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> "Although I do not believe that SHOO's work on the date/time is legally
> infringing on Tango's time code, I feel there's been enough bad feeling
> about this and that we should not include Tango's time api design in
> Phobos.
> I apologize to SHOO for this. I know this is unfair to him.
> Andrei has given a start to std.gregorian, perhaps SHOO's implementation
> work can be transferred to this to help complete it?"
> --
> So I want to re-stress some points I have made in the past, and respond to
> some statements that have been made by others.
> First, let's recap what happened.  According to SHOO, he was a user of
> Tango's time library, and used the online documentation of Tango, and the
> existing implementation of Phobos to write a new Phobos-ified time library
> that was similar to Tango's api.  Having been one of the main authors of
> Tango's time package, I examined SHOO's implementation side-by-side with
> Tango's, I can say that I believe him.  IMO, it's not the same code or
> even derived, it just has a similar feel.
> Someone from Tango was alerted to this, and considered it to be infringing
> to the point where he/she called Walter and told him so.  Walter, as
> someone who wants nothing to do with controversy and possible legal
> issues, refused to accept the code based on this accusation.  Note: I was
> not a part of this call, so I do not know what was said exactly in it,
> these are my interpretations of the posts on the newsgroup.
> Lars of Tango wrote a message to the Phobos mailing list indicating that
> in his opinion, "claiming a clean room implementation of an API in D is
> difficult, if for no other reason that it is (due to imperfect doc
> generation etc) somewhat difficult to properly study a D API without at
> the same time reading the source (or glimpsing at it). Even if you have
> good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important to know this, there
> may be less forgiving actors out there."  You can read the entire message
> here: http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-April/000370.html
> Coupled with the phone call asking Walter to block the code, at this
> point, we could just say that Tango was being careful.  But under the
> circumstances, it appears to me that Tango is under the impression that
> simply admitting one has used Tango, combined with having made a library
> inspired by Tango's API, is enough to warrant an accusation of
> infringement.  I don't even know if anyone from Tango examined the code or
> not.
> Thus ensued a large discussion (to phrase it politely) in which several
> good ideas for resolving the problem came to light.  Some of them focused
> on getting a boost license for Tango's time code.  It was revealed that
> one of the authors, John Chapman, was not reachable by the Tango team, and
> so it would take some time to get John's permission.  After a few days, I
> took it upon myself to seek out John and get his input.  He responded to
> me positively, and indicated he would alert the Tango team.  If we count
> the four authors listed in the Tango code (I'm somewhat convinced that a
> 5th author does not exist), that meant that both John and I had agreed to
> license the time code under the boost license for Phobos.  This left two
> authors.
> Out of respect for Tango's ownership of the situation, I let it sit for
> over a week, expecting at any time that someone from Tango would contact
> Walter with good news.  Having heard nothing, I decided to push the matter
> a little further and post to the newsgroup my success with John.  An
> indication from Moritz Warning, a Tango user, was that he had spoken with
> the remaining two authors: "I have asked Kris Bell and Matti Niemenmaa.
> No Problem at all."
> This left the infamous 2nd gunma... I mean 5th author.  After requests for
> who this person was on the newsgroup, I got nothing.
> Almost two weeks later, I decided to give up temporarily on the 5th
> author, if the other two were OK with it, I could get more leverage to
> finding out who that 5th person was.  I just wanted to make sure I had a
> direct statement from both those authors, as hearsay isn't very good
> evidence.  After posing the question to Moritz, Matti Niemenmaa posted his
> approval of the license change on the newsgroup. (A sincere thank you for
> that!)
> Which leads us to Kris.  Apparently, Kris has no comment.  Having no
> comment in this issue is equivalent to saying no without sounding like you
> are saying no.  Because a unanimous 'yes' vote is required to change
> things, abstaining means things will stay the way they

SHOO's Time code -- conclusion

2010-06-10 Thread Steven Schveighoffer
I want to first qualify that I represent only myself, nobody from Phobos,  
nobody from Tango, not Walter nor Andrei nor Kris nor Lars nor SHOO nor  
anyone but me.


Please see this message:

http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-June/000783.html

Quoted here completely for convenience:

Walter Bright wrote:

"Although I do not believe that SHOO's work on the date/time is legally
infringing on Tango's time code, I feel there's been enough bad feeling
about this and that we should not include Tango's time api design in  
Phobos.


I apologize to SHOO for this. I know this is unfair to him.

Andrei has given a start to std.gregorian, perhaps SHOO's implementation
work can be transferred to this to help complete it?"

--

So I want to re-stress some points I have made in the past, and respond to  
some statements that have been made by others.


First, let's recap what happened.  According to SHOO, he was a user of  
Tango's time library, and used the online documentation of Tango, and the  
existing implementation of Phobos to write a new Phobos-ified time library  
that was similar to Tango's api.  Having been one of the main authors of  
Tango's time package, I examined SHOO's implementation side-by-side with  
Tango's, I can say that I believe him.  IMO, it's not the same code or  
even derived, it just has a similar feel.


Someone from Tango was alerted to this, and considered it to be infringing  
to the point where he/she called Walter and told him so.  Walter, as  
someone who wants nothing to do with controversy and possible legal  
issues, refused to accept the code based on this accusation.  Note: I was  
not a part of this call, so I do not know what was said exactly in it,  
these are my interpretations of the posts on the newsgroup.


Lars of Tango wrote a message to the Phobos mailing list indicating that  
in his opinion, "claiming a clean room implementation of an API in D is  
difficult, if for no other reason that it is (due to imperfect doc  
generation etc) somewhat difficult to properly study a D API without at  
the same time reading the source (or glimpsing at it). Even if you have  
good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important to know this, there  
may be less forgiving actors out there."  You can read the entire message  
here: http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-April/000370.html


Coupled with the phone call asking Walter to block the code, at this  
point, we could just say that Tango was being careful.  But under the  
circumstances, it appears to me that Tango is under the impression that  
simply admitting one has used Tango, combined with having made a library  
inspired by Tango's API, is enough to warrant an accusation of  
infringement.  I don't even know if anyone from Tango examined the code or  
not.


Thus ensued a large discussion (to phrase it politely) in which several  
good ideas for resolving the problem came to light.  Some of them focused  
on getting a boost license for Tango's time code.  It was revealed that  
one of the authors, John Chapman, was not reachable by the Tango team, and  
so it would take some time to get John's permission.  After a few days, I  
took it upon myself to seek out John and get his input.  He responded to  
me positively, and indicated he would alert the Tango team.  If we count  
the four authors listed in the Tango code (I'm somewhat convinced that a  
5th author does not exist), that meant that both John and I had agreed to  
license the time code under the boost license for Phobos.  This left two  
authors.


Out of respect for Tango's ownership of the situation, I let it sit for  
over a week, expecting at any time that someone from Tango would contact  
Walter with good news.  Having heard nothing, I decided to push the matter  
a little further and post to the newsgroup my success with John.  An  
indication from Moritz Warning, a Tango user, was that he had spoken with  
the remaining two authors: "I have asked Kris Bell and Matti Niemenmaa.   
No Problem at all."


This left the infamous 2nd gunma... I mean 5th author.  After requests for  
who this person was on the newsgroup, I got nothing.


Almost two weeks later, I decided to give up temporarily on the 5th  
author, if the other two were OK with it, I could get more leverage to  
finding out who that 5th person was.  I just wanted to make sure I had a  
direct statement from both those authors, as hearsay isn't very good  
evidence.  After posing the question to Moritz, Matti Niemenmaa posted his  
approval of the license change on the newsgroup. (A sincere thank you for  
that!)


Which leads us to Kris.  Apparently, Kris has no comment.  Having no  
comment in this issue is equivalent to saying no without sounding like you  
are saying no.  Because a unanimous 'yes' vote is required to change  
things, abstaining means things will stay the way they are.  That's an  
interesting way to go...


So to answer some questions/comment