Been filling out a certain online form for a certain form of state-sponsored insurance (for once I'm with the trend in Silicon Valley). Failed with the latest IE, Mozilla 1.0, and Netscape 4.*. Finally Netscape 7.0 could hack it (all on MacOSX).
It was over a few weeks ago, but after-effects lingered until now. Saw Oregon, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all in one trip (hybrid drive-fly thing). The tricky bit was reversing our path, to make our way back from the beautiful northern Wisconsin lake to poolside California via Minnesota, South Dakota, and Oregon. Played golf twice and listened to a lot of (lowest-common denominator) top-40 radio.
sustaining development
I've been thinking about models for supporting ongoing development of free software. How do we get closer to the reality of proprietary software development, where the money that changes hands finances future development and lubricates communication about desired evolution of the product.
...more thoughts later...
ivtools-1.0.6 is out. Other than a host of build-from-source fixes, it most significantly speeds the asynchronous import of rasters from URLs by avoiding incremental display. You still get a placeholder image and return to interactive control before the connection is established and the download begins. But now you won't see anything but the placeholder image until the download is complete. The incremental display was pleasing in the era of 56k modems, but an inefficient annoyance for broadband connections.
RedHat 7.* and gcc-2.96
I finally faced up to what was required for compilation of ivtools on RedHat 7.* (it seems extraneous includes of string.h have been pulled from stdio.h, or something similar). The problem never was gcc-2.96 (a version of gcc never approved by the gcc steering committee). My bias about the ever-evolving g++ environment had blinded me to the simple fixes necessary to accomodate such a major distribution.
Still no explanation for why ivtools slipped out of Debian woody. And to think I had been carefully watching for such an occurence for almost a year. Hard to notice if no one documents it. I really appreciate Debian's effort to be a true-blue free-software distribution. But I never get a feeling of respect for the producers who give them their raw material (we're called upstream maintainers instead of developers, which in my case is only half true -- 50% of ivtools is new code).
karma balance
To balance my karma I have to think of something positive to say. Hmmm. The Onion is extremely prescient? No, I don't think that will do.
C'mon, this shouldn't be so hard... I got it -- catch They Might Be Giants at First-Avenue on Sat. August 3rd and especially Sun. August 4th where they will promote their new best-selling children's album "No!". There. Does that work for you?
The way I see it, energy banditos from Texas figured out how to transfer massive amounts of capital from the speculative boom of Silicon Valley to their own pockets by gaming California's energy market. Something that abruptly halted the day a Vermont Senator abandoned their political party of choice, transferring control of the investigative power of the Senate to the opposition. But the damage was already done with long-term contracts signed for way-over-market-rate energy for the next decade. The problem is the transfer of capital is not from those who got rich on the boom in California to those under investigation for shady business practices in Texas. It is from those recent home purchasers in California who are contributing half a billion dollars in increased property tax to the state coffers, money that would have gone to increase the outlay on education, and restore quality in California public schools that has ebbed away since Proposition 13. You stole from my kids, and you can bet I'm going to remember.
(ok,ok, that isn't quite so. Most of the cost of long-term energy contracts is passed on to all consumers and businesses rather democratically I believe, not paid by the state. But increased cost of living and/or manufacturing will show up as decreased state coffers, and fewer resources for education. I suppose vouchers will be the proffered solution. Grrr....).
Related News
In related news, Joel Klein, the former head of the Justice Department anti-trust prosecution against Microsoft, was appointed head of New York City public schools. Bye, bye Windows.
jamesh, you are right, in that it is the NPL which is clearly a dual-licensors creation. The MPL only equates to that if Netscape used their right to change the MPL into the NPL or something similar. There is a difference between declared intent to make a profit off of proprietary versions (the NPL), and a loophole that would allow for this declaration in the future (the MPL). A loophole that exists for the FSF with the GPL as well, but in that case one would have to worry about leaning to the left rather than leaning to the right.
rendering libraries
You raise an interesting point with your reference to Mozilla's policy on non-original software. Someone ought to get in touch with the Mozilla SVG folks (any here?) and discuss this. I want my, I want my, I want my SVG (in Mozilla).
Wait, is libart specific to X11? That would be a more concrete reason why Mozilla can't standardize on it. I wonder if they've heard of Vector-AGG?
Hold it, what am I saying? The libart-enabled copy of Mozilla I have runs on Windows. Somebody has ported it. So back to my first question...
some time passes
Ok, here's the real answer to my question about libart and SVG:
From what I understand, SVG can't be added until all of the missing hackers (http://mozilla.org/MPL/missing.html) are found to complete the relicensing. If and when the are all found, Mozilla can include the LGPLed code needed to render SVG, such as Libart.
I'm intrigued by the level of support for SVG in Mozilla. But it's not ready for widespread use yet, one of the issues being the lack of a rendering library that conforms to the desired MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licensing.
That leads me to look up the relevant license haiku for MPL:
MPL: like LGPL / except netscape is allowed / to change the license
Hmmm, studying the text of the MPL it seems the above haiku is no FUD. For all intents and purposes licensing your software under the MPL seems equivalent to assigning your copyright to a dual-licensor. In either case they reserve the right to take your software places you can't go. And if you agreed with that, you would have used BSD/MIT in the first place.
tor, I imagine generating PDF is conceptually simple, it's all those details that fill up the 978 page reference manual that give me pause. Given scarce time resources I feel much better about my chances of success if I can find a C library (and a C API) to invoke. And then I might get upgrading to future versions of the format for free (p.s. I tried building mupdf-0.2 yesterday on RedHat 6.2 using gcc-3.0.1. Sorry, I gave up after failing to get fontconfig configured and built, which required libxml2, which required ... I'll try again someday, probably on a modern copy of FreeBSD).
Does the AFPL allow commercial web service use?
So now I'm back to consideration of PDFlib, which is available under the AFPL (Aladdin Free Public License). It's already got a FreeBSD port, and there is a request in to package it for Debian.
For the most part I can live with the AFPL. I used to sell CD-ROMs loaded with free software and map data, but I always allowed non-commercial duplication (hand them out to all the kids on your block). Now I distribute everything gratis. My only concern is with Thomas Merz's interpretation of the AFPL, where he says it doesn't apply to using the software for commercial Internet services (as documented here):
A commercial PDFlib license is required for all uses of the software which are not explicitly covered by the Aladdin Free Public License, for example:- shipping a commercial product which contains PDFlib,
- distributing (free or commercial) software based on PDFlib when the source code is not made available,
- implementing commercial Web services with PDFlib.
However I find a clearly obvious contra-indication to his conclusion in section 2b of the AFPL:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification of the Program are not subject to this License and they are outside its scope. Functional use (running) of the Program is not restricted, and any output produced through the use of the Program is subject to this license only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Hmmm.
Researching ways of exporting PDF from a vector-graphic drawing editor written in C++ (there seem to be a lot of non-C libraries available as free software for PHP, Java, Python, etc. -- oh well). I've come across these:
Since none of these has a license I can work with directly (i.e. MIT/X11 or LGPL), I would probably have to create a derivative work that incorporated a subset of ivtools that can import the idraw EPS format. Then I could increment the format version number to add alpha-transparency and other desired extensions.
I could also consider exporting through the Sketch format, which supports everything I care about out of PDF, and use its PDF export plugin (written for Python), but that seems like a drag to have a a second drawing editor required for export from the first drawing editor.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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