Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 15:02:19 +0900 From: Stephen Turnbull To: DJGPP AT SUN DOT SOE DOT CLARKSON DOT EDU Subject: Distributing djgpp (or any other large package) This is my last post on this thread. I apologize for the original post's testy tag line. I should have been more polite. The tone of *this* post I do not apologize for. Protecting CopyLeft in its various forms requires protecting copyright of profit-grubbers, too. I think discussion of Copies Right and Left is relevant to this list. Flames to poster, not to list (except for Mr. Appleyard, who of course has public right of reply if he wishes). From A.APPLEYARD: I wrote:- > May I suggest another way, cheaper than setting up a FTP server? [Technical nitpicking moved to end.] I wrote:- > Let the site (university or whatever) keep djgpp etc on a notebook PC, > already unzipped if there is hard disk room for it; and also LAPLINK. If > Mr.X wants djgpp (or whatever), someone takes the laptop, and a laplink > connecter cable, and a floppy with LAPLINK on it ... Stephen Turnbull replied:- > When I first looked into LapLink, I believe it had the standard > idiotic licensing, which required you to buy LapLink for each > computer you wanted to transfer to. Have they fixed this bug? ... Must I bother with such fiddle-de-dees? No, I can't force you and I'm not going to report you to the manufacturer of LapLink. I said what I think of that kind of behavior in my previous post. If that doesn't bother you, don't worry. Who's going to bother? Me. I told you, I didn't buy LapLink. Must I state explicitly that I did not because I could not imagine myself resisting the temptation to violate the license as I understood it? I care. If you don't, that and my opinion of you are your problem. If I have a licenced copy of Laplink, and I temporarily copy it to the receiving computer, who's going to bother? Noone. However, you're violating the license, as far as I am concerned. But that is *not* what you are talking about. See below. Surely it's in the nature of Laplink and similar that it must be on 2 PC's for it to work!?!? So what? The manufacturer can offer a two-for-the-price-of-one license if he wishes. She can offer a temporary-copying-OK license if she wishes. As I understood the LapLink license, it did not. OK, so if I undertake to delete the Laplink off each ^^^^ So you *do* realize that you are massively doing something. I think that something violates the license. receiving PC afterwards: etc etc: but in the real world, at least in England, there is a legal Latin saying "De minimis non curat lex" = "The law does not concern itself with trifling matters". This is not an individual, trifling matter. You are talking about buying *one* copy of LapLink (or did you borrow it from a friend in the first place, and get some techie buddy with a lot of scrap connectors to make you a cable?) and making it organization policy to use it to copy to multiple machines---otherwise it's not a server-in-a-backpack. Simple computation by Microsoft's algorithm: value of theft = (price of LapLink) X (number of machines served). I wrote:- > to Mr.X's office, and thus copies in as much or little of djgpp (or > whatever) as Mr.X wants. A file server in a backpack! Stephen Turnbull replied:- > If "someone" isn't on call within the same amount of time as for > the original installation to provide Mr.X with the sources, this > is a copyright violation ... DJ and Bob Babcock pointed out that this is probably not required. I stand corrected. When the server-man goes to Mr.X's office, he then laplink copies in Gnu C only, or all of djgpp, or whatever Mr.X wants out of djgpp. As regards the risk of Mr.X getting the minimal set quickly, and later wanting the full form but the server-man is at coffee or off scuba diving or whatever: it is a delay indeed: but when I got a bigger PC and wanted to get the full form of djgpp by FTP it certainly wasn't `on call within the same amount of time as for the original installation'!, the net was dead slow and the server was logged-in full, and I had to come in to work early one weekend morning to get the full djgpp. Give me a break. We're talking about policy, not the conditions on the day in question. All I asked was that the sources be available on that server-in-a-backpack, and that the policy state that requests for sources have the same priority as requests for binaries. The former either requires a much bigger hard disk, or that the attendant spend lots of time reloading packages. The latter means somewhat more delays, but is not required per DJ and BB. If your local net is dead slow, that's your problem: spend more money and get a faster net. If the remote host is congested, I suggest archie -h archie.au archie -h archie.fortune.co.jp for a good shot at finding servers which *won't* be congested during British office hours. The CopyLeft clearly does not make the server responsible for network congestion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technical nitpicking follows: Stephen Turnbull replied:- > Um, what's cheaper than free? Erh???? FREE!?!?!? First I'd have to buy a PC to dedicate as the Nope; you are already supplying a laptop. It's tight, but you can run Linux on a 386sx/20 laptop with 4MB RAM and 40MB HDD (I've done it as proof of concept, but returned to DOS+DV/X for everyday work since Linux didn't have a driver for my banana-flavored Japanese screen). I bet your laptop is bigger than that. FTP server, to run day and night, and PC's cost. Then find the Does your server-in-a-backpack run day and night? If the server were a 8MB RAM, 350MB machine it could easily multiboot Windowze and Linux. Or it could run DESQview/X (although I don't know for sure that DV/X is good about accepting incoming connections over a modem or other serial line). What's the time cost of the server-in-a-backpack's Boy Friday? Let's say it's student part-time labor at 500 yen (= 6 dollars = 4 pounds)/hour. The system above can be had for well under $1500, or 250 hours. Will your Boy Friday do 250 hours of running around over the useful life of the server? If there are people on-site whose applications do not involve Windowze, but only text (such as programming), they can run Linux + DOSemu and serve 100MB of FTP and HTTP archives in the background. (This wouldn't be worth thinking about on the 386sx/20+4MB+40MB, for sure; I'm guessing at the minimum machine size above.) space for it. And connect it to the internet. To run a PC as an FTP server, would it need any extra boards or chips? My If it has a modem, you're in (slow) business. You only need one connection. Why do you have to connect to the Internet? You're serving internally I thought. That's certainly the application I was describing; I didn't ask you to compete with SimTel. department's two Novell server PC's have to have extra boards. Novell servers AFAIK don't have to have extra boards to be a server. If you want to connect a Novell network to the Internet the easiest most efficient way is to let the Novell network run IPX internally and have the server act as a gateway to the Internet running on the IP standard. This can be avoided, at a severe cost in performance I believe (have no experience myself, this is just from reading Crynwyr packet driver docs). Stephen Turnbull replied:- > Get Linux. OK, if yer runnin' Maxen you can't run Linux (or *BSD, is that > right?) Excuse my ignorance, but what are Linux & Maxen & BSD? I only use #define Maxen pluralize(contract("Macintosh")) Linux is a CopyLeft Unix kernel written specifically for the 80386 and compatible processors. *BSD = NetBSD | FreeBSD | 386BSD are freely redistributable implementations of the Berkeley Systems Distribution version of Unix. 386BSD obviously was written for the Intel iAPX family of processors, but I believe at least some of the *BSD kernels have been ported to other processors (although not to the Macintosh AFAIK). PC's, not Unix. My PC has the Clarkson FTP system on it (but it is not configured as a server). -- Stephen Turnbull / Yaseppochi-gumi / http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ anon FTP: turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp Check out Kansai-WWW, too ------------> http://pclsp2.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/