Skip to main content

The growing up of the GPL

I first ran into the GPL in some book. It could have been a coding book or a latex book. I didn't care about licenses at that age, but I remembered it because it contained the following extract:
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names: 
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
Now, these guys must be fun to hang out with! That's what I thought. Recently, I looked up GPL3. Stallman's blurb on why we should switch was all peachy and militant. But what really disappointed me was the end of the license:
If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
    Copyright (C)   
 This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
 This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
 under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
So boring! These guys are grownup now. They're not any fun anymore...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remove field code from Word document

e.g. before submitting a MS, or hand manipulating some formatting because Word does things (like cross-references) so half-assed [from here ] Select all the text (CTRL-A) Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 Editing to remove anonymous comments that only contain thanks. I really appreciate the thanks, but it makes it harder to find comments that carry pertinent information. I'm also going to try and paste informative comments in the body of the post to make them easier to find.
24 comments
Read more

h5py and multiprocessing

The HDF5 format has been working awesome for me, but I ran into danger when I started to mix it with multiprocessing. It was the worst kind of danger: the intermittent error. Here are the dangers/issues in order of escalation (TL;DR is use a generator to feed data from your file into the child processes as they spawn. It's the easiest way. Read on for harder ways.) An h5py file handle can't be pickled and therefore can't be passed as an argument using pool.map() If you set the handle as a global and access it from the child processes you run the risk of racing which leads to corrupted reads. My personal runin was that my code sometimes ran fine but sometimes would complain that there are NaNs or Infinity in the data. This wasted some time tracking down. Other people have had this kind of problem [ 1 ]. Same problem if you pass the filename and have the different processes open individual instances of the file separately. The hard way to solve this problem is to sw...
Post a Comment
Read more