Two More Winning Titles From SYS-CON Media - IT Solutions Guide  (Yahoo!) (Market Wire) The launch issue of IT Solutions Guide, published four times a year, will be poly-bagged with the May 2004 copies of SYS-CON's 12 monthly journals and magazines. Readers of the IT Solutions Guide will be handpicked from SYS-CON's 304,187 subscriber database to ensure that only those readers who are classified and qualified as development and corporate managers receive the free supplement on the most competitive tools, solutions, and services available. (continued...)

Two More Winning Titles From SYS-CON Media - Information Storage & Security Journal (Yahoo!) (Market Wire) Information Storage & Security Journal will launch on May 11, at the Networld+Interop Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. Until now security professionals and storage professionals haven't really spoken the same language, and their goals have often been at odds with each other. ISSJ serves security and storage professionals by delivering security subject matter in context with popular storage applications, and vice versa. (continued...)

Summary
It will one day in the not-too-distant future require 2 years' computer time just to work out if you have any substantially similar code that infringes on the exponentially growing pool of GPL'd code, speculates retired physicist Daniel Wallace.

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About Daniel Wallace

Advertisement Read Daniel Wallace's original Letter to the Editor Read response to Daniel Wallace by Celia Santander Esq. This is neither a legal conclusion nor a philosophical statement of bias but merely conjecture for thought. Suppose all the programs ever released under the GPL are placed in a non-commercial public domain trust fund. There are a few million lines of copyrighted code in a Linux distribution. Add all the code at SourceForge. How many lines now? 100 million? How about everything out there? Technology is growing exponentially. How many lines in ten years? 10 billion? How many in 20 years? 100 billion? One requirement to show infringement is access to the code. If it's publicly available then that element of infringement is a foregone conclusion. What does a commercially motivated original author do to check that the ever larger growing pool of code structures that exist out there in non-commercial GPL trust are not "substantially similar" to to his code? Is he infringing? How long does it take to check with ESR's code comparator program? ESR says 2 million lines per minute on a 1.8 GHZ Intel Box. The implementation is O(n(log n)). So: (100E9)log(100E9) = 25.3 x 100E9. So 2.53E12 / 2E6 = # of minutes = 1.26 million minutes. (check the math) That's about 2.4 years to find out if you have any substantially similar code that infringes on the exponentially growing pool of GPL'd code. Of course the GPL code pool grew during that 2.4 years. Is that practical or desirable? Are we wishing for something we really don't want? What do you think? Join the Feedback to this item.

About the author Danniel Wallace is a retired physicist who has been connected with Open/Free software for some time. He is an associate member of the FSF (#1550). (more) Related Stories · MAIL BOX: SCO Wins Convert to its GPL-is-Invalid Argument · LINUX VIEWPOINT: MyDoom Worm "Harmful to Linux Reputation" · Mail Bag: Practicing Law Without a License · LINUXWORLD FEEDBACK: "The Copyleft/GPL Is Unequivocally a License" 17 feedback items so far - last one posted 10 February 2004 07:15 PM Re: Bill P. commented ... I think you misunderstand what GPL really is. GPL is a license under which you distribute your COPYRIGHTED software. It is NOT public domain software, and you retain your copyrights and the right to distribute it under a proprietary license. Shareware does not serve any function other than to try to get people to try your software, and it produces poor quality buggy software - it is not a shared development method and doesn't save development costs. The latter is why GPL software is taking the software development world by storm. One way of making money from GPL is by GPLing software and then offering an alternative proprietary license to proprietary developers. The GPL license ensures the software is established as a standard, gets bebugged and maintained for minimal cost, and more importantly, prevents other people from ripping it off and selling it as a proprietary product because they can only sell their product as GPL unless they license your code from you under a proprietary license. This allows you to license out your code as a proprietary product for those who want to link it to a proprietary product. Trolltech does this with it's QT libraries, Borland does this with it's Interbase SQL server, and so do a lot of others. Another take on this - Why does nobody sell cheap SuSE Linux CDs? Simple. SuSE sells it's installation and configuration program YAST under an open source license that allows anybody to modify it if the modification is made available for SuSE, and copy and redistribute it freely provided it is redistributed free as in $0. The result is no cheap SuSE CDs and everyone paying SuSE about $90 for each CD set. Why? because nobody is going to burn a CD which costs them 50 cents and give it away free. GPLing something works in a similar way. It protects the copyright holder's source code which has been made readable by the public, by forcing those who might steal it to give the source code free or at a very low price. This is why GPL software is so popular with software developers. View/Join Feedback to this item.

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