Re: Of mice and men


In article <4bqee.14268$3U.948063@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Donald Tees <donald_tees@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> To talk about "Linux" is really a bit of a misnomer ... the real topic
> is the GPL, or general public licence.

The GPL is the GNU Public License. It was written by the Free Software
Foundation for the GNU project, and while it has been used by non-FSF
software, it's only one of many open-source licenses in use. Other
prominent ones include the FreeBSD license and the Apache Foundation
license.

There's also the LGPL, or Lesser GNU Public License, which was developed
for licensing GNU components that are used in programs written by third
parties - mainly shared libraries. Many people are concerned that the
GPL is "viral" - that if you make any use of any code licensed with the
GPL in a product, then the GPL applies to the entire product. (Whether
this is actually true is an open question, as the GPL hasn't been tested
by the courts in any jurisdiction, AFAIK.)

The LGPL tries to be explicitly non-viral.

I think what Donald's getting at, though, is that the real feature of
interest is not so much Linux as such (ie, the kernel), but the whole
phenomenon of Open-Source Software (OSS), which includes Free Software
(as defined by the FSF) and a lot of other software which isn't GPL'd
but is freely available in source form.

> That is a legal agreement of copyright

Technically, no. It's a license and is independent of copyright.
Those are both constraints on intellectual property, but they apply
to different actions.

Typically, authors of OSS either retain copyright and provide an OSS
license, or they surrender copyright and put their work in the public
domain. You have to retain copyright to apply a license to source
code.

> ... that the software under it will be distributed in *source
> code*, and may be used freely under that licence *provided* that all
> subsequent code using it also includes source, original source, and
> attribution to the authors. That is the gist of it. The full agreement
> and thousands of articles are freely available for further reading.

True of the GPL; other OSS licenses may have different terms.

> Thousands of programs have been written under the GPL. They include
> everything from the Appache web server,

Nope. The Apache Foundation has its own license.

> to the Openorg office suite (spread***, word processor, etc.).

OpenOffice uses the LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source
License). Its documentation is licensed unde rthe PDL (Public
Documentation License).

> They also include *several* Gui's,
> that run under Linux as clients. Most of them run using the GPL Xorg
> screen routines, so are compatible.

Actually, X itself - the X Window System version 11, aka X11 -
includes the server, which handles all the GUI device I/O, rendering,
and IPC; several common clients; shared resources like fonts;
utilities; and some simple window managers.

The GUI look and feel for X-based systems is provided by a "window
manager", which takes care of things like, well, managing windows
(letting you position and resize them, hide and reveal them, etc),
window decorations (title bars and such), maintaining configurations
and preferences, and so on.

I'm not aware of a Linux GUI that doesn't run on top of X11.

X was originally developed as part of MIT's Project Athena. It
became the dominant GUI for Unix systems (forcing out alternatives
like Sun NeWS and the NEXT GUI, which was based on Display
Postscript). What wasn't common among Unix systems was the window
manager - there were a bunch which came with the base X distribution,
proprietary ones supplied by OEMs, homebrew ones (I wrote one once
myself), open-source projects, and finally Motif, which was developed
by the OSF consortium.

These days there are still quite a few X window managers floating
around, but on Linux the dominant ones are KDE and Gnome.

X11 first appeared in the late 1980s, though it's had numerous updates
since. Window managers come and go, but X keeps right on chugging
along.

One of the notable features of X11 is that the protocol between
clients (applications) and servers (the windowing system) can run
over any transport. Since it first appeared, X11 has been remotely
accessible - like Remote Desktop for Windows, except cleanly
integrated from the start.

The Linux X implementation for x86 hardware is XFree86. The XFree86
Project has its own OSS license. No GPL there, either.

> As well, it includes Linux itself
> (normally called the kernel), and compilers to compile it all.

True. The base kernel is released under GPL version 2, as are most
kernel modules. Some of the kernel code is dual-licensed under GPL
and BSD; users can choose which license they want to apply to them
(apparently - I don't think this has been tested in court either).
Some kernel modules have proprietary licenses and there have been
various discussions about what *that* means in terms of the GPL.

Linux is usually (always?) built with GCC, the GNU Compiler
Collection, which includes C, C++, Fortran, and other compilers. As
GNU programs they're GPL-licensed, of course.

> Strictly
> by the licence,though, you are entitled to and get *source code*. And
> that on a module by module basis, from the owners.

Yep. And in practice you can in fact download all of the sources,
and most distributions include them anyway as optional components.

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Pocket #9: A complete "artificial glen" with rocks, and artificial moon,
and forester's station. Excellent for achieving the effect of the
sublime without going out-of-doors. -- Joe Green
.

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