Looks like I'm settling into the same frequency of diary entries as a lot of others. Oh well, you all really didn't want to hear my rants every day, did you?
Lots of interesting discussion on making software path-relocatable; clearly some things I hadn't thought about (which was really the point of posting in the first place). I tried to check out Figure but the project page seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth along with the rest of fig.org. I did manage to snag a copy last night but I was far too sleepy to make sense of it, so I started downloading some MP3s by Higgins instead. I discovered him last week and plan to buy his CDs sometime. He's very good despite being categorized as "easy listening" on mp3.com. :-)
I wanted to contribute some thoughts about the GPL's "teeth" but decided it would probably contributed to the license flamewar that was advised against, so I decided against it. Actually, I fear that someday GPLv3 will rise up with prohibitions against dynamic linking, CORBA-style remote invocation, and such. I fear that many hordes of new programmers will start to use it blindly and create a whole new class of software that is unusable by anything *but* GPL'd code.
The way I see it, free software is so powerful right now that we don't have to entirely rely on copyright protection anymore, because even if someone did proprietarize a piece of software, the majority of the force would still be behind the free version. The question I would ask: "If free software is so powerful, why do we have to guard it night and day with a nuclear arsenal?" I will probably only license my own code under the GPL if I absolutely need to -- i.e. to satisfy the requirement in question.
On the ideas front: wondering about the feasability of a Java object database like Zope's ZODB. Would use serialization and such. I think I have conceptually how to do such a thing, although how and whether or not to implement versioning is pretty gray right now.
nymia: perhaps we should get you your own box apart from the rest of the recent diary entries? :-) kidding, of course...