The Gypsy Violin
by Munda
The compelling violin lures With an irresistible yearn Dance, dance, please dance for me
I can no longer adjourn!
Ethereal notes float from its strings Caressing like a lover’s hand Sensual music, Angel’s touch
Leading the way to wonderland
Embracing with utter delight Craving, beckoning me Tempting my lonely heart
Dance, dance on my melody!
Faster, faster the music escapes Without compassion to body or soul Seducer of lonely hearts
Until dancing is my only goal
Faces gyrate while I dance on passion Flashes of fire in the corner of my eyes The violin plays like never before
Until I become one and loneliness dies
With a final cry and a final touch The violin stops, the music ends Leaving behind an emptiness
We’ll meet again, my violin friend
When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
ref. url: When You Are Old
So, according to a story on Reuters, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is evaluating whether or not to ban Novell from didtributing future versions of their Linux OS.
“The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft,” Eben Moglen, the Foundation’s general counsel, said on Friday.
Apparently they might use their lock on the intellectual property rights to key pieces of the opern-source OS to achieve this.
My questions:
- Exactly how are they going to achieve this, if the software is open-source?
- Which version of the GPL are they going to claim that permits this?
- How does this action promote the goals of the FSF which according to their About Us page include: “our worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users.”?
Has Richard Stallman lost his ever-loving mind? He wants people to use Linux. And not just as the OS they run on their servers, but as an everyday OS. He wants people to stop using DRM on their electronically available downloads, as evidenced by the campaign to stomp out DRM.
If Novell wants to enter into a business agreement that results in commercial support and interoperability with the non-free software juggernaut Microsoft, then how is this bad for Linux?
Just because RS doesn’t like Billy Gates and his commercial giant, doesn’t mean that he needs to start by using the same tactics he stands against when someone gets in bed with MS and Linux at the same time.
Shame on you RS, put your money where you values are. If you want people to use open-source then don’t use bullying tactics to keep it from happening.
UPDATE: according to a story at Linux-Watch, the Reuters story is misleading. Apparently the patent agreement is completely legal under GPL v2, but they are working on a language for the next GPL v3 draft that will make it a violation of the license. I say again: why is this MS/Novell deal bad for Linux? And as the Linux-Watch story points out, the current Linux kernel developers don’t like GPL v3 and apparently have no plans to move from GPL v2.