Great F*king Wall
As you already know, chosen web sites are being blocked by GFW (Great Firewall) in China including WordPress blogs. For me, unfortunately ZenHat, is also listed as one of banned sites.
I’ve done my best to be a loyal WordPress user and all my expressions were/are about life and technology. Hence it’s even difficult to imagine the reason behind the decision. Banning a site is as simple as entering it to a firewall ACL but the consequences are not that ease or simple. Anyway I was able to access wp-admin bypassing GFW . But the unfortunate part is that I’m unable to express my ideas to over 2 billion people and most importantly the largest country of Internet community.
Thanks RMS!
During my SL visit, I received FSF membership materials. I was wondering to read “Free Software Free Society: selected essays of RMS” for months. The very first thing I did was stick a “INSIDE GNU/Linux” sticker over MS badge on my new notebook.
op5 and GPL
op5; a network management/monitoring tool set developed on mighty Nagios. For me, the most important and interesting thing is the way they use open source concept.
What does op5 mean by open source,
With open source, we mean that the source code, which constitutes our products, is made available to our customers, who can utilize, read and modify the code. This assures the user that the program is doing what it should and is adjustable to fit the customers needs. Such modifications are commonly made by the original author, who may choose to make those adjustments a part of the official version. Find more information about the projects we build our products upon.
And see how they use GPL,
In GNU General Public License 2.0, it says (translated freely) that it is prohibited to withhold source codes from the user, if the source code is a development of the source code protected by GPL. One is not allowed to further spread the developed software or the original. However, there is nothing that states that one has to make one’s seperated and stand alone add ons available to the general public.
op5’s products are based on a number of different GPL licensed softwares. We develop functionality, which is normally added to one or more open source code programs. The code usually involves integrated functions, between several independent programs, in order to obtain added functionality and/or user-friendliness. Our source code is always available to our customers.
This introduces a few (but not trivial) problems and also shows how depth an enterprise can go with GPL. As I’m not an expert on legal matters, no serious comments will be raised here.
Anyway, at the end of the day, GPL has ended up as propriety license.
Back to SL
It’s with great pleasure to get back to homeland, Sri Lanka, tomorrow. This time a small vacation that I would like to be with my family and friends and also wondering to get rid of Internet, at least for couple of days. At Shanghai; where I live, I couldn’t make any discussion or participation in any physical event on free software for last five months. And it seems, China is much far away from SL in terms of Free Software. And I suspect, Chinese locale issues (language and politics) also influenced on me to have such an idea.
Anyway.. I’ve got a few SL projects on PHP and Ajax before I get back to SL. But my desirability on C made a decision to not to continue with them. It’s right time for me to start some C projects before I forget everything.
Anyway, after reading the Fyodor’s Slashdot interview, I’ve started reading “Practical UNIX and Internet Security” again. The interview made an impression on me about systems security. And I think, Fyodor’s Defcon 2008 presentation is a must-see program. As always, he’s one my heroes.
It seems that SL entrepreneurs are struggling for finding open source developers these days. I’ve seen quite a lot opportunities on web and newspapers.
It’s very bad to hear struggles at my university again. I’m wondering to see a peaceful situation there as soon as possible.
