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LeopoldS

Global Innovation Commons - 4 views

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    nice initiative!
  • ...6 more comments...
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    Any viral licence is a bad license...
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    I'm pretty confident I'm about to open a can of worms, but mind explaining why? :)
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    I am less worried about the can of worms ... actually eager to open it ... so why????
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    Well, the topic GPL vs other open-source licenses (e.g., BSD, MIT, etc.) is old as the internet and it has provided material for long and glorious flame wars. The executive summary is that the GPL license (the one used by Linux) is a license which imposes some restrictions on the way you are allowed to (re)use the code. Specifically, if you re-use or modify GPL code and re-distribute it, you are required to make it available again under the GPL license. It is called "viral" because once you use a bit of GPL code, you are required to make the whole application GPL - so in this sense GPL code replicates like a virus. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the so-called BSD-like licenses which have more relaxed requirements. Usually, the only obligation they impose is to acknowledge somewhere (e.g., in a README file) that you have used some BSD code and who wrote it (this is called "attribution clause"), but they do not require to re-distribute the whole application under the same license. GPL critics usually claim that the license is not really "free" because it does not allow you to do whatever you want with the code without restrictions. GPL proponents claim that the requirements imposed by the GPL are necessary to safeguard the freedom of the code, in order to avoid being able to re-use GPL code without giving anything back to the community (which the BSD license allow: early versions of Microsoft Windows, for instance, had the networking code basically copy-pasted from BSD-licensed versions of Unix). In my opinion (and this point is often brought up in the debates) the division pro/against GPL mirrors somehow the division between anti/pro anarchism. Anarchists claim that the only way to be really free is the absence of laws, while non-anarchist maintain that the only practical way to be free is to have laws (which by definition limit certain freedoms). So you can see how the topic can quickly become inflammatory :) GPL at the current time is used by aro
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    whoa, the comment got cut off. Anyway, I was just saying that at the present time the GPL license is used by around 65% of open source projects, including the Linux kernel, KDE, Samba, GCC, all the GNU utils, etc. The topic is much deeper than this brief summary, so if you are interested in it, Leopold, we can discuss it at length in another place.
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    Thanks for the record long comment - am sure that this is longest ever made to an ACT diigo post! On the topic, I would rather lean for the GPL license (which I also advocated for the Marek viewer programme we put on source forge btw), mainly because I don't trust that open source is by nature delivering a better product and thus will prevail but I still would like to succeed, which I am not sure it would if there were mainly BSD like licenses around. ... but clearly, this is an outsider talking :-)
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    btw: did not know the anarchist penchant of Marek :-)
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    Well, not going into the discussion about GPL/BSD, the viral license in this particular case in my view simply undermines the "clean and clear" motivations of the initiative authors - why should *they* be credited for using something they have no rights for? And I don't like viral licences because they prevent using things released under this licence to all those people who want to release their stuff under a different licence, thus limiting the usefulness of the stuff released on that licence :) BSD is not a perfect license too, it also had major flaws And I'm not an anarchist, lol
Paul N

Gravitational wave discovery kills 90% of physics theories - 0 views

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    "The BICEP2 data would eliminate about 90% of inflationary models, Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, told a packed auditorium at MIT the day after the BICEP2 announcement (see picture below). Many of those models do not produce gravitational waves at detectable levels, said Linde, who is one of the founders of inflation theory." Is there any hope for LISA now?
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    Of course - the data is more proof that GWs exist!!
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    so you don't expect any impact on the science objectives of Lisa at all?
annaheffernan

How to make droplets chase each other and self-assemble into devices - 0 views

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    Droplets can be made to chase each other around a track and even self-assemble into devices, simply by mixing two everyday liquids. This remarkable discovery made by scientists in the US has already been used to create beautiful shapes and patterns, and could also be exploited to create optical components that assemble themselves and even to clean surfaces. It looks very like Jojo's self-assembling balls :p
Thijs Versloot

Scotland's Renewable Sector Generated Over 100% of Electricity Needs In October - 0 views

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    Clean Power November 5th, 2014 by The Scottish renewable energy sector is one of the world's best performing, and new data from WeatherEnergy has shown that October was a "bumper month" for the country, generating more than enough electricity from renewable sources to power the country.
Thijs Versloot

Engineering three-dimensional hybrid supercapacitors for high-performance integrated en... - 3 views

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    Stacking laser printed supercapacitors (no clean room required btw) has lead to about 1100F/g and thus about 20-40Wh/L. For supercapacitors thats pretty damn good. For reference, Li-ion recently reached 650Wh/L. The gap is closing, although for supercaps of this type the theoretical maximum is 1400F/g.
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