Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
David Johnson wrote: On Monday 22 January 2001 09:35 am, Bryan George wrote: Okay, I'm writing it down: "Audience = inflexible Unix bigots = document = brain dead ASCII text". Got it, thanks! Sigh... I don't have MS Office, and I am not about to pay for it. This has nothing to do with bigotry, but everything to do with my money, my harddrive space, etc... And when it comes to a choice between rebooting the system to run your document's native OS, or shelling out yet more money to get VMWare, I'll just abstain. I'm just busting your chops a little, really... :) You don't have to convince me of the need for a low-cost, accessible, open way to pass docs around - I just got a little tweaked with the "Real men use ASCII" crud. %b There are alternatives so use them. If the presentation you are sending is comprised solely of verbal content, then ASCII is sufficient. If you need some small amount of text formatting, try HTML. And if you need to control the document's appearance exactly, try PDF. I was going to suggest that - presumably anyone with pockets for Office can pick up a copy of Acrobat as well, and the reader's free and multi-platform. Cheers, Bryan -- David Johnson ___ http://www.usermode.org begin:vcard n:George;Bryan tel;fax:703-883-6708 tel;work:703-883-5458 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.mitre.org org:The MITRE Corporation;Signal Processing Center adr:;;1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W622;McLean;VA;22102-3481;USA version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Lead Signal Processing Engineer fn:Dr. Bryan George end:vcard S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Bryan George [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Johnson wrote: On Monday 22 January 2001 09:35 am, Bryan George wrote: Okay, I'm writing it down: "Audience = inflexible Unix bigots = document = brain dead ASCII text". Got it, thanks! Sigh... I don't have MS Office, and I am not about to pay for it. This has nothing to do with bigotry, but everything to do with my money, my harddrive space, etc... And when it comes to a choice between rebooting the system to run your document's native OS, or shelling out yet more money to get VMWare, I'll just abstain. I'm just busting your chops a little, really... :) You don't have to convince me of the need for a low-cost, accessible, open way to pass docs around - I just got a little tweaked with the "Real men use ASCII" crud. %b I didn't say that real men use ASCII. Merely that with some audiences you have to if you want to be heard. There are alternatives so use them. If the presentation you are sending is comprised solely of verbal content, then ASCII is sufficient. If you need some small amount of text formatting, try HTML. And if you need to control the document's appearance exactly, try PDF. I was going to suggest that - presumably anyone with pockets for Office can pick up a copy of Acrobat as well, and the reader's free and multi-platform. Why not pick up TeX? The output looks about as good as you will get, it can be presented as PDF, the source is human-readable and small, and bit-rot is zero. Oh, and both software for reading and creating is free. OK, so it is not open source. And before anyone points me at standard GPLed packages for TeX, allow me to point out that Knuth's software is under a license that does not permit modifications. IANAL, but AFAICS if you incorporate work which you are not allowed to modify into GPLed software, then you have no right to permit modifications as required by section 2 of the GPL, and under section 7 you are then not allowed to distribute the GPLed work as a whole. Not that Knuth is likely to complain unless someone tries to modify it in some way. (Like Slackware made the mistake of doing a while ago...) Cheers, Ben _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Ben Tilly wrote: ... Why not pick up TeX? The output looks about as good as you will get, it can be presented as PDF, the source is human-readable and small, and bit-rot is zero. Oh, and both software for reading and creating is free. Ah, TeX - that takes me back - wy back... :) DocBook would be my suggestion if you really want to go fancy and free. It's XML-based, the DTD and "db2*" tools are Open Source, and it fans out to PostScript, DVI, HTML, PDF, and RTF. Texinfo does a lot of the same, but doesn't have the XML cachet DocBook has. Cheers, Ben Over and out, Bryan begin:vcard n:George;Bryan tel;fax:703-883-6708 tel;work:703-883-5458 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.mitre.org org:The MITRE Corporation;Signal Processing Center adr:;;1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W622;McLean;VA;22102-3481;USA version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Lead Signal Processing Engineer fn:Dr. Bryan George end:vcard S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Document formats (was: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source)
begin Bryan George quotation: I'm just busting your chops a little, really... :) You don't have to convince me of the need for a low-cost, accessible, open way to pass docs around - I just got a little tweaked with the "Real men use ASCII" crud. %b There _was_ a time (up to circa 1988) when Microsoft used document formats that could reasonably be used as a gemerally-readable format after only a modest amount of reverse-engineering by other parties. Of late, unfortunately, especially with the default "fast save" option, their formats often cannot be deterministically read by anything but the latest Win32 versions of Microsoft's products. (And I hear horror stories even there.) In any event, I've been tempted to start an information-clearinghouse site listing the leading formats for various types of data files, the major drawbacks of each (including vendor lock-in), the state (functionality, stability, encumbrances if any, coverage among proprietary packages) of the leading "open" document format, and details of possible migration stategies. The aim would be to let people know what their options are, if they attempt to move data out of the proprietary formats where they're held hostage. I fear that the task is a bit ambitious, and am trying to figure out how to start with something small yet useful, and aim to build up. Also, some vital compatibility information will probably be available only from testing proprietary applications and OSes, which I don't have. So, this would have to involve participation from users of that software. Additionally, I'm a little unclear on what is going to make a format recommendable in the real world. It seems debatable. E.g., TeX / DVI is an ideal, stable, robust format for publishing (modulo some reported weakness in handling graphics), but reportedly has poor desktop-OS software support. These issues may become clearer if/when I try to prototype a site. -- Cheers, "Reality is not optional." Rick Moen -- Thomas Sowell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Document formats (was: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source)
Rick Moen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In any event, I've been tempted to start an information-clearinghouse site listing the leading formats for various types of data files See http://www.wotsit.org/ It's probably not everything you want, but it's a start at what you seem to describing. Ian
RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
From: Bryan George [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] I was going to suggest that - presumably anyone with pockets for Office can pick up a copy of Acrobat as well, and the reader's free and multi-platform. [DJW:] There are royalty free and "open source" tools for creating and viewing PDF, from third parties (e.g. recent ghostscript, and ghostscript old enough to be GPLed). -- --- DISCLAIMER - Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.
Document formats (was: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source)
begin Ben Tilly quotation: [TeX:] OK, so it is not open source. And before anyone points me at standard GPLed packages for TeX, allow me to point out that Knuth's software is under a license that does not permit modifications. IANAL, but AFAICS if you incorporate work which you are not allowed to modify into GPLed software, then you have no right to permit modifications as required by section 2 of the GPL, and under section 7 you are then not allowed to distribute the GPLed work as a whole. LaTex is "based on" Knuth's work in the sense that it implements the TeX design, but my understanding is that it is not a derivative work in a copyright sense, but rather was written separately by Leslie Lamport, and is now maintained by the LaTeX3 Project (http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html). I could be mistaken, but am basing my comments on a quick search of the online FAQs and other documentation. (I haven't examined the copyright notices on LaTeX's source packages.) -- Cheers, "Reality is not optional." Rick Moen -- Thomas Sowell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Document formats (was: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source)
begin Ben Tilly quotation: See http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/node2.html for confirmation. See also http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/node4.html for evidence that there is at present no plan to remove the dependency upon TeX. Thanks for the clarification. LaTeX is made to work atop "any standard TeX system (or whatever replaces it)". -- Cheers, "Reality is not optional." Rick Moen -- Thomas Sowell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
News flash: A _lot_ of technical people are using Word docs and PowerPoint presentations these days - Linux/VMWare is my weapon of choice, but there are others. Bryan Ben Tilly wrote: Jorg Janke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to raise three issues: a) License issues b) Compiere license b) Open Source Trademark a) General License issues --- - I am a bit frustrated about the process; I had to submit our suggestion three times before receiving the first feedback. It would help if you sent mails as regular ASCII rather than formatted HTML. This is a question of knowing your audience. HTML can be made to look nice, which means that it will go over well with suits. However it suffers from bit-rot, displays differently on different platforms, is more complex for standard text tools to process, etc. Therefore technical types tend to see HTML email in the same category as Word and Powerpoint attachments - a sign that the sender is not technical and does not have a clue about how the technical community works. So say it in ASCII. It may not look as pretty to you, but it will go over a lot better with us. begin:vcard n:George;Bryan tel;fax:703-883-6708 tel;work:703-883-5458 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.mitre.org org:The MITRE Corporation;Signal Processing Center adr:;;1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W622;McLean;VA;22102-3481;USA version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Lead Signal Processing Engineer x-mozilla-cpt:;-9184 fn:Dr. Bryan George end:vcard S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Bryan George [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: News flash: A _lot_ of technical people are using Word docs and PowerPoint presentations these days - Linux/VMWare is my weapon of choice, but there are others. News flash: Doing so is still a good way to guarantee that a lot of other technical people will drop your document in the circular bin sight unseen. Who is your audience and what is the document for? Cheers, Ben _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Title: RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source Hi Larry, Here some ideas and suggestions: - If someone send s mail to license-approval, just acknowledge the mail, say it might take 6 months and that they should evaluate using the license in the meantime. This sets expectations and buys you time. - If you are swamped with license requests, I think that the only way put is to create a standard license with just replacing the name and a few options to either select or not select (I guess mainly in the area of what to do when re-distributing). I cleaned up our license suggestion and it might be a starting base. The main difference to many other licenses are: commercial use, require 3rd party license. Gone are the restrictions criticized before. Links: http://www.compiere.org/license.html and the as much pure ASCII as a MS Windows system allows version http://www.compiere.org/license.txt . It would actually be nice to make it more readable for non-lawyers, but would need feedback for that. - If you have a standard license, than I would definitely charge for the approval. IBM, Netscape, Apple, Sun, etc. will pay. Use a revenue scaled fee, maybe starting at $1000(Whatever a hired lawyer would charge) - What you want to do (I assume) is help the hacker to have a license to protect him/her - and that should be for free. All the others using Open Source as a publicity or marketing tool should pay by their ability. - This would give you time to help the hacker, concentrate on new areas and make the others pay for what they are looking for. - I subscribed to the license-discuss for a while before sending my last mail ... and I read more or less all licenses published on your site. You are probably aware, that most companies use the open source initiative as a publicity tool hey we are the good guys - same as open system movement a few years back. - Consequently, I really think you guys need to change your emphasis from approving Licenses to coming up with a Good Open Source Seal or something like that. I am in this industry for more than 20 years starting as a hacker to senior management and back to hacker (because management stinks). When I started, I thought that my source is the most valuable I have. I realized, that giving it away does not harm you at all, it gives the recipient just a good feeling. Even if a bad person takes it and does something you would not like, the damage is minimal. - The main difference between commercial software and Open Source is not that you can get the source, but that you can legally use it without paying. How many people are capable changing code of Apache? But on the other hand, how many people use a MS Word license for more than one person/pc - or forgot to count a few users/CPUs/MHz/etc. for their Oracle or other server licenses? - I think that you need to try to protect the (sill good) Open Source name - Or it will simply end up as slapping your source on the web, offer implementation and support (the only way to get it working) and sail under the Open Source the good guy banner. With the ASP model becoming more and more attractive, the support fee just includes the prorated license fee. I just paid my yearly Borland JDeveloper support fee (which is just upgrades) for $2400 - a new license is $2900 - effectively you are paying $500 for the free implementation support after the initial purchase. AGAIN: - Concentrate on the IMPORTANT parts - and License issues are not the most important part for the Open Source movement well ... after approving mine ;-) The license can only be a part. - Suggestion for the Good Open Source Citizen Seal administration process: a) The person(s) interested fill out a form and sign it b) You believe them and they get the seal c) The seal is just a graph linking to a site where you list the nice guys d) On the nice guys page are the criteria listed and a link to a form which can be filled out if someone thinks that they don't follow the principles by letter or spirit e) If you get an email, you ask the seal owner for comment/change and decide f) If required, seal is revoked and the page link put to a bad guys list and I would even volunteer to set up the process and maintain these pages. P.S.: Sorry about sending messages in something other than base ASCII. Cheers, Jorg Janke (203) 445-8182 www.accorto.com Smart Business Management Solutions www.compiere.org Open Source ERP -Original Message- From: Lawrence E. Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 02:13 PM To: Jorg Janke; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source I am answering an email that was posted to license-discuss. It raised several concerns that are widely shared. I am writing both to apologize about the long delay in responding to your (and many other) licenses, and to ask your patience. The board of directors of OSI is a volunteer group. They have limited time
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
On Monday 22 January 2001 09:35 am, Bryan George wrote: Okay, I'm writing it down: "Audience = inflexible Unix bigots = document = brain dead ASCII text". Got it, thanks! Sigh... I don't have MS Office, and I am not about to pay for it. This has nothing to do with bigotry, but everything to do with my money, my harddrive space, etc... And when it comes to a choice between rebooting the system to run your document's native OS, or shelling out yet more money to get VMWare, I'll just abstain. There are alternatives so use them. If the presentation you are sending is comprised solely of verbal content, then ASCII is sufficient. If you need some small amount of text formatting, try HTML. And if you need to control the document's appearance exactly, try PDF. -- David Johnson ___ http://www.usermode.org
To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Title: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source I would like to raise three issues: a) License issues b) Compiere license b) Open Source Trademark a) General License issues --- - I am a bit frustrated about the process; I had to submit our suggestion three times before receiving the first feedback. - If you only want to deal with the Fortune 1000 - please say so. - The current ready to use licenses available are inconsistent and there is no guideline when to use what - If you want to take the Open Source License seriously, but don't want to deal with the little guys, I suggest you come up with some templates - or do something like eTrust http://www.etrust.com/webpublishers/pub_resourceguide.html - I don't think that people would mind the alternative: use one of the following templates or pay a fee for us looking at the license - assuming that there are templates available and some guideline for non-lawyers when to use which. b) Compiere License (www.compiere.org/license.txt or www.compiere.org/license.html) -- - The feedback/critique I received was valid, but my reply unanswered. - Could you please tell me if I should just forget about it, come back later, ? c) Open Source Trademark - As you know, the 'characteristics' of Open Source projects are very different. Recently, there are quite a few companies using the Open Source as marketing tool (in addition to the failed commercial projects) - I think, you guys need to come up with some guidelines on 'ethical' Open Source projects. I realize that there is a fine line ... and Tim O'Reilly would not support an Open Book Source project similar to the original Napster. - I suggest that you come up with some guidelines (and even approval process) to separate the good from the others. - Some of the major points, I see: - Does it need to compile (out of the box in defined environment) ? - Does it need to be installable (out of the box in defined environment) ? - Can it rely on or requite products only commercially available ? - Can you charge a download fee ? - Would you be able to use the product without paid support ? - To test your criteria, you should have a look at www.opensales.org - try to install it, try to do something with it (you can't get support from www.opensales.com if you have not paid for the estimated $100,000 implementation project) - Another test criteria would be Compiere. Our intension is to make Compiere THE ERP system for the little guy with 50% market share - by giving it away and offering support for the not so technically/functionally inclined. But, our credo is, that it has to work out-of-the-box without limitations or outside help - Our targeted guarantee: up and running 2 hours after download or shame on us. We see the main acceptance in third world countries (who would not be able to pay anyway) resulting in an active user and developer community. Cheers, Jorg Janke www.accorto.com Smart Business Management Solutions www.compiere.org Open Source ERP for the Small-Medium-Enterprise
