"bugroff" license
I ran across an interesting Open Source license the other day, John Carter’s Bugroff License, included below. It’s among the license acceptable to the Debian project.
Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation devised, in addition to some marvelous software, the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Or the CopyLeft it is sometimes called.
It is quite a revolutionary document, using the “copyright” tool to to protect your right to use free software.
Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.
In fact, various inconveniences relating to this have resulted in modifications such as the LGPL (Library General Public License) and more recently the NPL (Netscape Public License)
I call these matters mere inconveniences, the real damage will occur when the Jackal’s, (sorry, I mean lawyers), actually get to test the GPL in court for the first time.
Thus enter my version.
Its very simple.
Entirely consistent.
Completely unrestrictive.
Easy to apply.
The “No problem Bugroff” license is as follows…
The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is….
Sure, No problem. Don’t worry, be happy. Now bugger off.
All portions of this license are important..
- “Sure, no problem.” Gives you complete freedom. I mean it. Utterly complete. A bit of a joke really. You have complete freedom anyway.
- “Don’t worry, be happy.” Apart from being good advice and a good song, it also says :- No matter what anyone else says or does, you still have complete freedom.
- Now bugger off. The only way to get rid of pushy Jackals is to ignore them and not feed them. The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court. Can’t you just see it. Exactly the same thing that happened when some twit (not Linus) registered Linux as his own personal trademark. People got upset, started a fund, and hired, off all ruddy things, a Jackal to try and defend the chicken! Who really benefits from this trademark / patent / copyright thing anyway? The lawyers. Who made it up in the first place? The lawyers.
OK so the last part of the license sounds a bit harsh, but seriously folks, if you are a :-
- Lawyer asking these legalese questions… You should go off and learn an honest trade that will actually contribute to life instead of draining it.
- Programmer asking these legalese questions… You have amazingly powerful tools in your hands and mind, use them to ask and answer the worthwhile questions of life, the universe and everything. Stop mucking about with such legal nonsense and get back to programming.
- User/reader asking these question… Don’t worry. Go off and be happy. Have fun. Enjoy what has been created for you.
Yeah, we'll get right on that
A colleague of mine tells a story about being harangued during an outage because his system was too slow and to do something about it, where the punchline is that doing something about it would mean either increasing the speed of light or reducing the distance or both. I thought it was a joke until the other day when I myself saw one of these design requirements come through.
The designer expects a 10ms round-trip. The end-points are roughly 5000 miles away. Now if you’re not laughing already, I’ll do the back of the envelope for you- The speed of light in a vacuum is 1,079,252,848.8 km per second. The distance is approximately 8000 km. This works out to just a little under 16ms round-trip before considering that data networks are slower than light, that the network and application protocols involve several round-trips and that the application on each end must process the data.
A teammate politely pointed them in the right direction.
Notes: OSX, FreeBSD, OpenVPN and NFS
For my own convenience I want to access my FreeBSD home directory from my laptop. [OpenVPN](http://openvpn.net) seemed the least trouble and since I have a limited number of systems, I settled on distributing static keys. These are my notes. See the OpenVPN documentation, specifically the [OpenVPN 2.0 HOWTO](http://openvpn.net/howto.html), and the FreeBSD manpages for details.
Configuring the server (FreeBSD) side:
1. install openvpn2 using ports or package.
1. configure openvpn for both server and a client:
1. create a directory /usr/local/etc/openvpn with a subdirectory keys/.
1. copy the easy-rsa/2.0/ directory to /usr/local/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa.
1. create ca cert, . ./build-ca.
1. create a server cert and key, . ./build-key-server server.
1. create client cert and key, . ./build-key client.
1. copy config sample to /usr/local/etc/openvpn/openvpn.conf
1. edit to suit, I like to put the log and status to /var/log, use log-append and bump up the log detail to 4.
1. add openvpn\_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf.
1. start the daemon with /usr/local/etc/rc.d/openvpn start.
1. Add an entry to /etc/newsyslog.conf to handle our new logfile: /var/log/openvpn.log 600 7 * @T00 J
1. I set up NFS to serve home directories on the private network used for the OpenVPN tunnel:
1. Either use sysinstall or do it yourself to add to
/etc/rc.conf:
* nfs_server\_enable="YES"
* rpcbind\_enable="YES"
* nfs\_server\_options=”-t -u -h 10.8.0.1 -n 4”
/home -network 10.8.0.0 -mask 255.255.255.0"
1. start the daemons with /etc/rc.d/rpcbind start, /etc/rc.d/nfsd start and /etc/rc.d/mountd start
Configuring the client (OSX) side:
1. Install openvpn2 from darwinports or you can make life easy and
grab [Tunnelblick](http://www.tunnelblick.net/) which has prebuilt
packages along with a minimalist GUI.
1. Copy the ca.crt, client.crt and client.key from the server to the
appropriate directory for the client host. This is
~/Library/openvpn in my case.
1. Start the tunnel. Note that it syslogs, so look in the Console.app
for errors and warnings.
1. From the Finder, choose Go, then Connect to Server (apple-K). In
the dialogue box put nfs://10.8.0.1/home.
If all went well, you should have a new folder named “home” on the desktop. It’s almost certain that your UID/GID don’t match on the two systems so look there if the mount is read-only.
Matias Tactile Pro keyboard
I spend a lot of time at the keyboard, often upwards of eight hours a
day. A couple of years ago I [blogged about
keyboards](http://www.lonsteins.com/archives/2004/12/29/keyboards/)
and how I love the rugged Type-M buckling spring design. I keep a few
around with PS2 and USB adapters for home and work but for the Mac, I
was using a vintage 1990 Apple Extended Keboard II. This keyboard is
often referred to as the “Nimitz”, supposedly after its codename
during development, and the name is apt- it is huge and overbuilt.
I’ve been using it with an [iMate adb-usb
adapter](http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imate/) for years
and while the setup was sometimes dodgy, it usually worked. The
keyboard is not as industrial as IBM’s best and after sixteen years of
intermittant use the spacebar is showing signs of wear and the keyboard is
suffering key bounce and missing key presses. So it was time to
replace it.
But replace it with what? I got my hands on a new, sans box
EnduraPro/104 a few years ago and it was a good keyboard. I used it
until the rubber nub on the pointing stick wore out but it wasn’t the
Type-M. I’ve seen one and think the Avant is overpriced, even for a
niche product. So I gambled that the reviews and comments on the
[Matias Tactile Pro](http://www.matias.ca/tactilepro/) were accurate
and bought one from [Small Dog](http://www.smalldog.com), my favorite
vendor for things Mac-related. It’s not cheap, but I hoped that the
price was an indication of quality.
I’ve been using it for a couple of days and, yes, it is a quality
keyboard. The first thing that struck me when I took it out of the box
was that it was relatively light. The second was that the little feet
to change the angle have two positions- up and down- and they are
slightly springy. It’s different from my old Nimitz, a little firmer,
the keys slightly smaller and the travel is maybe a little shorter but
it’s as good and maybe better. It’s firm and loud and within a few
minutes I didn’t notice the differences. I’m not making any more typos
than I do normally and I appreciate the two integrated USB ports. Back
to back, I prefer the old Type-M but I prefer the Tactile Pro to the
Nimitz.
Well done, Matias.
Ross Lonstein
