Software Licensing

Dumb/Stupid, Law/Legal No Comments »

The amount of licensing models available for open-source software is ridiculous. Why can’t the OSS zealots standardize on a few licensing models, instead of creating a new iteration every time they fix a spelling mistake in previous license?

For starters, there’s the all too familiar GNU GPL and LGPL licenses… which come in version 1, 2, 2.1 and 3. Version 4 is on its way soon.

Now head over to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and cock a snook at the variety available:

I like the close source world much better. OSS makes redistributing, or basing your application on the work of others a royal pain in the arse.

I did come across the WTFPL though – “Do What The Fuck You Want To public License.” The entire license is:

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
  14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

Aka, do whatever you like, modify the license however you like, and best of all, it’s a legally recognized license which will hold up in court :D

Read more about it here: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/

My browser has been raped by Thaksin Shinawat!

Browser, Dumb/Stupid, IT/Networking/Internet, Politics, Software No Comments »

I looked in the Firefox Help > About menu and guess what I saw?

Firefox raped by Thaksin Shinawat!

Firefox raped by Thaksin Shinawat!

As it turns out, the maintainer of the Noia Extreme theme is a Thai. Noia, being one of the Top 10 themes on Mozilla’s extension’s website obviously drew quite a lot of negative attention over it. Yet it still hasn’t been fixed, and users are posting “fixed” or “reverted” versions for those who don’t ish to have their favourite browser adorned by some Botox injecting middle aged Thai man.

I, as with most people consider this adware/political propaganda. Yes, as the author of the Firefox theme he can do whatever he wishes, but a more appropriate manner of expressing his views might have been a link on the theme’s download page, or a tab that opens with related information the first time the theme is used. I don’t see the point of that image actually – clicking on it doesn’t provide any information, or open a new page/tab.

Hopefully the Noia Firefox logo will be restored soon… or I might install the IE7 theme for Firefox in protest :(

Nero AG is so annoying

Hardware, Rant, Software 1 Comment »

Nero Burning ROM/Nero AG’s website is useless – there are news articles and mention of a Nero SDK on many the websites, but nowhere on the internet can you actually find information about it, or download it. Nero AG’s FAQ, support and corporate info are all useless waffle. All the links that ARE on Google no longer work since Nero AG took to restructuring their website every few months. Great way for attracting developers there.

…are their web designers that bored? Or are they struggling to lift their image after 3 successive bloatware releases?

At least Roxio tells you upfront that an API is not available, Gear sells their API to developers, and CDBurnerXP redirects you to their corporate website/online store. InfraRecorder and CDRTFE are the only decent open source “burners” for Windows, but are purely front ends (they are based on cdrtools) which has severe limitations and most other free burning applications have no scripting support/APIs available, without contacting corporate sales and ponying up anyway.

Edit: Decent apps with scripting support – CDRTFE, CDBurnerXP, Nero. Still waiting for a reply from Nero about their SDK, and CDBurnerXP has an known bug with the command line that keeps cropping up in tests :(

Bloatware Name & Shame

Rant, Software 2 Comments »

Time for yet another page – bloatware.

(links on the top RHS)

Or click here if your really freakin lazy.

As defined by wiktionary:

Noun

bloatware

  1. (computing) Software that is overpacked with features (a result of feature creep) and therefore slow or unwieldy; software that occupies an excessive amount of memory or has a very large file size.

Name and shame list for the worst software applications developed (open-source, freeware and commercial) ever to be processed in this digital world and viable alternatives.

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