Mind that Dante invented the language that italians speak. That is, he encoded and merged vulgar latin as had evolved in contact with the laguages of the northern invading tribes that overran the Roman Empire for the previous 750 years in successive waves. And his version became the new pidgin in which peoples from all the Italic peninsula could communicate with each other, as the Pontifical States adopted the language as official that made its establishement easier[1]. Each region had its own language and that situation remained until the late XIX Century.
[1] Don't be surprised. Take for example Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and large parts of Kashmir. It is an entirely artificial language, based on Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by the British Raj <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Origin> as a political decision to submit the local population.
Really, you need to actually go out and meet the world around you. It isn't all wine and roses I assure you, but it is better than living in a bubble, those burst, you know. If you decide to travel to South America and go by Bogotá, contact me and I'll show you around the good, the bad and the ugly.
Just walk into an alley at night in Manhattan or Chicago or Boston or Los Angeles or (surprise!) San Franciso and you'll know... Seriously, read the newspapers of any more or less poor third world country and you will find many notes about people mugged and killed, stabbed or shot to death, to steal them some US$75 chinese MediaTek shitphone you can find in Amazon.
I'll give you some newspapers in Latin American cities that range from 6 to 25 million inhabitans:
Hmm... There is a basic misuse of terms here. The author uses the term "distributing applications" but he is actually talking about application deployment. Oh well, language evolves and most of the times becomes murkier.
But I do agree. There is a in inherent higher barrier of entry when you force your users to install third-party libraries or even your deliverable from an outside ("fourth-party"?) distribution source. Be it ruby gems, CPAN, Pypy, cabal, whatever.
I agree. And I think that FreeBSD and DragonFly stand over the rest in this respect, both have incredible technology in their guts. Obviously OpenBSD has done wonders teaching people that you can write sane, safe and audited code that works and NetBSD... Oh well, stagnant despite the really good technology that shows up in there frequently, but runs on toasters!
"GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical
to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based
on our experience with other operating systems. In particular,
we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof
file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent
display support, [...]
Linux has, eventually, started to fulfil the promise: technologies like cgroups, dm, uevents, kdbus, alsa..., and the respective userspace: systemd, dmraid, lvm, udev, pulseaudio, show that GNU/Linux is not UNIX but better in some respects.
Sigh This just goes to show what kind of damage people with little knowledge and big egos can do. Ever read about Dunning-Kruger Syndrome folks? Now you are witnessing a typical example in all its pathetism. And all started here in HN.
No. The GPL is about the users. It empowers those who use the software to have access to the source and in case they are so inclined (say, the developers are a bunch of tools that don't listen to the needs of the users), to be able to run away with the code and continue with real user oriented development. That is, a fork.
This "the GPL gives developers power" is pure FUD that showed up in the 90's as part of the reactionary trantrums throw down by some BSD groupies and by ESR and his gun-toting friends who wanted to sell Free Software to the corporate world, so they corrupted the term and invented Open Source. It just so happens that developers are users too.
So, if you want to strike it rich with open core, sure, you choose a lax license, say MIT or Apache, or even better BSD 2-clause, and when the suckers have implemented all the features and ironed out the bugs, you run away with the code, sell your startup and more power to your bank account in the Caiman's. Right?
So, no. The reason why the corporate world uses the GPL instead of the BSD license for the really important stuff is because it creates a level-playing field. It is the same situation as the Cold War (perhaps you are too young to remember its lessons?): "If you and I can blow each other to bits and take everybody else with us in the process, let's stop and rather do some conquering and plundering together, shall we?" And that's exactly why the mobile space is a nasty, miserable world of patent lawsuits: There are no mutual assurances of total, generalized annihilation if someone doesn't want to play by the rules. Patents are just not it; ask the Chinese.
I'm glad to see that gnuplot has come a long way since the last time I tried to create publication quality plots with it and ran away in horror to fall in the arms of the usual commercial suspects. But these days, python based solutions have more appeal, I like matplotlib a lot.
Fact is that Oracle bought Sun to have control of Java. As many know, all the middleware and development tools that Oracle sells for its database are written in Java. They even tried to replace with some success Pro*C with some sort of Java from hell in the late 90's.