Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 9/6/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/6/2000; 2:16:58 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/6/2000
Msg #:20905
Prev/Next:20904 / 20906

DaveNet: The Major Leagues.

At the last minute I've been invited to speak at the MB5 conference on Saturday. Should be pretty interesting.

Linux Today: Guido van Rossum responds to Python Licensing Issues. "In any case we don't want to use *just* the GPL for Python, because there are many proprietary software developers in the Python community who don't want to work with the GPL. Python has always had a BSD'ish license which was perfect for them. I see no reason to suddenly confront everyone in the Python world with the GPL."

Thank you. Don't give in to Stallman. Open source should not have restrictions. Stallman's philosophy is not open source, it's not the spirit of sharing, it's not generous. It has other purposes, it's designed to create a wall between commercial development and free development. The world is not that simple. There are plenty of commercial developers who participate in open source. Python belongs in commercial products. How does that hurt Python? Why should Python adopt Stallman's goals? What has he done to build Python? (Maybe I'm missing something.) I have a different philosophy which is incompatible with GPL, I will support any open source developer who truly lets the source go. Also, I much prefer the term "commercial" to "proprietary", which is perjorative, imho. (It's possible to make commercial software which is quite open and has major non-proprietary elements.)

BTW, I spoke with Nicholas Petreley this afternoon. We're in agreement on a lot of things. The world is much bigger than it may seem. Just because people send hate mail that doesn't mean we have to hate each other. Ignore the barriers, in the end guys like Stallman can have their way, inside their walls, inside a very small world. If you can see a way to avoid the GPL, you can count on our support. Petreley told me the story of KDE and it made me sick. They were so generous. Keep it simple. Generosity is good. Period.

The next innovation in Radio UserLand is the most direct way to edit a website ever. Think of it as a "public notepad" that's structured of course. One outline for a whole website. No saving required. Where it once took three steps to publish to a website (the Edit this Page concept) now it takes zero steps.

Radio UserLand: Live Outlines.

Our design methodology, hack at the details, has yielded the ultimate in simplicity. There are no more details to hack at. This can happen when the editor and the server are the same app, and the editor is an outliner. It understands structure, it's not wizzy, but it does make you dizzy.

Here's a screen shot. Lots of stuff going on here.

To the Frontier community, even the ones who didn't come with us when we went commercial, please get in the loop on Radio UserLand. If you loved what we were doing, you gotta see what we're doing now. It's all coming together in hugely powerful ways. It's not just about music, and then of course, neither is radio just about music. There are talk shows and news, baseball and football, contests, phone-in shows, and commercials. We're doing the next medium. More than meets the eye. Help us explore it. We need all the brains we can get.

Speaking of big brains, Adam Curry's piece on formats is linked to from Slashdot, giving the server a good workout, over 15000 reads, but it seems to be holding up well.

Two-Mind-Bomb-Thursday: Macros in the Queue. "You could easily write a macro that always returns a random song that begins with the letter H. Or finds the least-played song in your song table and returns it." Programming in your programming. Cool? (I think so.)

Edd Dumbill: XML in the next-generation Web.

Red Herring: Novell moving from Netware to No Ware?

Tim Paustian: "I posted what I knew about the YieldToThread bug on the carbon development mailing list and to my surprise they suspect it of being a OS X bug and not in my application."

Who said that bounce messages can't be entertaining?

UserLand is getting involved with the Geek Pride Festival in San Francisco, Oct 13-14. I'm going to do a live session, and we may sponsor some party or event around it. Perhaps other weblog vendors would like to co-sponsor something to show unity in geekdom?

Wired: Mac users target Jobs.



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