Sunday, November 26. 2006
Google vs. gaia
Google has the reputation to be free software-friendly. Without doubt they did a lot in the past, especially many Summer of Code-Projects, that developed essential features for free software projects.
That google is also willing to put legal threat on free software projects if they compete in their are, they recently showed against the project gaia. It was a project to have a replacement client for google earth (google's own client is proprietary). It was done by pure reverse engineering. The author took the project down after he received a letter from google.
It's quite questionable if gaia is doing anything illegal. They didn't use any data from google, they just provided another client for the service. In my opinion it's very important to fight for the right to reverse engineer. Many essential free software projects wouldn't exist if we couldn't reverse engineer. Just think of many hardware drivers, filesystem support, samba, many multimedia codecs, support for proprietary document formats (e. g. doc in OOo) and lot's more.
By the way, I took the freedom to host a copy of the latest gaia-version (and, as requested by some comments, the win32-patch for gaia). It's GPL, so everyone is free to continue the development.
That google is also willing to put legal threat on free software projects if they compete in their are, they recently showed against the project gaia. It was a project to have a replacement client for google earth (google's own client is proprietary). It was done by pure reverse engineering. The author took the project down after he received a letter from google.
It's quite questionable if gaia is doing anything illegal. They didn't use any data from google, they just provided another client for the service. In my opinion it's very important to fight for the right to reverse engineer. Many essential free software projects wouldn't exist if we couldn't reverse engineer. Just think of many hardware drivers, filesystem support, samba, many multimedia codecs, support for proprietary document formats (e. g. doc in OOo) and lot's more.
By the way, I took the freedom to host a copy of the latest gaia-version (and, as requested by some comments, the win32-patch for gaia). It's GPL, so everyone is free to continue the development.
Posted by Hanno Böck
in Computer culture, Copyright, English, Gentoo, Linux
at
14:22
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Tuesday, November 7. 2006
IPv6 where are you?
Recently various news pages were posting about the nearing breakthrough of IPv6 (e.g. german newspage golem: IPv6 steht vor dem Durchbruch).
For me, associate of a small and innovative provider, I can't see this breakthrough. It seems nearly impossible to find hosting for dedicated servers which offer native IPv6 (at least with reasonable hardware/price conditions). Yes, I know I can tunnel through sixxs or other tunnel brokers, but I don't want low-speed IPv6 for people who can wait, I want to support IPv6 in same quality and speed than normal IPv4.
If you're working on the small side (dedicated servers, no colocation), you're out of luck twice. You hardly find providers that provide you with more than a few IPv4 IPs and you hardly can do anything to push the next gen IPv6 forward.
For me, associate of a small and innovative provider, I can't see this breakthrough. It seems nearly impossible to find hosting for dedicated servers which offer native IPv6 (at least with reasonable hardware/price conditions). Yes, I know I can tunnel through sixxs or other tunnel brokers, but I don't want low-speed IPv6 for people who can wait, I want to support IPv6 in same quality and speed than normal IPv4.
If you're working on the small side (dedicated servers, no colocation), you're out of luck twice. You hardly find providers that provide you with more than a few IPv4 IPs and you hardly can do anything to push the next gen IPv6 forward.
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