Letters to the editor

BK licence and other licences...

The BK licence sounds moderately benign, as there seems to be no suggestion
that if you pay for a BK licence you are prohibited from writing version
control software with it. I personally want all my software to be as good as I
can possibly make it and except the same applies to the subversion hackers too.
Right now sourceforge supports CVS so that is what I use.

If you want a dacronian and unreasonable licence then "Numerical Recipies in
{C,FORTRAN}" is a strong candidate---you are not allowed to give other people
access to your code based on numerical recipies, and that apparently includes
system managers on supercomputers. Someone got sued for transfering his
non-commercial code to a supercomputer (and as a result very few people doing
numerical computing have numerical recipies).

If you want to go further try the commercial software called GAUSSIAN, which
few lwn readers will have heard about. The GUASSIAN marketing materials says
very little about the licence apparently. If you are developing another
implementation then using guassian to check the results is probihited. So is
posting gaussian benchamrk results without the guassian people's express
permission and using gaussian for any commercial purpose, for exaple
calculating the electron density surrounding a drug or drug target (think weeks
on hundreds of processors). I will not repeat what I have been told
unofficially about the scalability of guasssian in public (i.e. here).

If the BK licence started to sound like that I suspect all kernel developers
would move to something else immediately.

-- 
Duncan (-:
"software industry, the: unique industry where selling substandard goods is
legal and you can charge extra for fixing the problems."

Comments (none posted)

Let your subscribers help prioritize your content

I'm so glad that LWN will continue; I'm a subscriber, and look
forward to the articles-to-come.  However, since the subscriptions
won't (yet) pay for as many editors as in the past, you will
obviously need to "cheapen" or cut back on some things.  I think
you should let your subscribers help guide what is most important.
Subscribers will unsubscribe if they're really unhappy, but hopefully
you can hear from them before that!!

For example: I find the front page, security, and kernel areas
of special interest to me.  The "distributions" section is only
of interest to me for important announcements about major distributions
(Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.) or of really important
specialized ones; I don't really need a list of every distribution
known to man, but I _do_ find it helpful to hear about major events
in major distributions I don't normally use.
The "Development" section is sometimes helpful, but often the
"Commerce" and "Press" sections are not.

This isn't a judgement on the writing; it's a judgement of
what _I_ want to hear from LWN.  There's no point in LWN
recycling what I can hear from elsewhere; what I want is
an identification of "what's REALLY important", and
analysis of "what it means," and the big picture from
a independent observer.  Even if I don't agree with you,
when you present your reasoning I'm sure to learn something.
I want more "analysis of these new OSI licenses, with pros & cons"
and don't need "here are the 50 new vendors running on Linux this week,
cut from their press releases."

Others may differ on their priorities, and that's fine.
But with limited dollars, I suggest that you work hard at
doing what you UNIQUELY offer that subscribers particularly like.


--- David A. Wheeler

Comments (3 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet