Journal wowbagger's Journal: Funny observation about Freshmeat 7
I have Freshmeat as one of my slashboxes, and this comes in useful sometimes as I see packages that are interesting that I would not have seen otherwise.
I also see a fair number of "Mystery Meat" packages - the ones with incredably helpful names like "Sporkwacker 6.2 zarph version", as opposed to "Fred's DNS 0.6". Now, you can pretty much guess that "Fred's DNS" is yet another DNS server or cache or resolver, or at least that it has *something* to do with domain name services, but you have no clue for something like "Sporkwacker".
So, every once in a while I will follow a Sporkwacker link, just to see what it is. And I've made an observation, and come up with a game.
So, here's the funny game - read all the steps before you follow the link:
- Read all the instructions.
- Follow this link: 1060 NetKernel Standard Edition 2.0.5 (Default branch).
- Read the About text, but DON'T LOOK AT THE LICENSE.
- Now, having read the description, guess what the license is:
- Free license
- "free to use but proprietary"
- "Free for non-commercial use"
- "Free trial, pay for continued use"
- Now, check the license and see if you were right
Here's the funny observation:
Free software has very clearly written descriptions, few buzzwords, and usually a pretty clear use-case for the software.
Proprietary software usually is buzzword-complient and gives you no clue as to why you would want to use the package.
Try it out yourselves and tell me your results.
easy (Score:1)
Re:easy (Score:2)
This immediately follows: "which is a convergence of the core ideas of the Web and Unix"
They threw in the "convergence" buzzword, too.
"The NetKernel abstraction simplifies complexity and thus increases the scope and potential of the systems built upon it."
That's definitely marketer-speak. Simplifies complexity? Hell, maybe they found a P solution to an NP problem, I should check it out!
Fun game, I might have to try it some more.
Maybe a web-based gam
LMFAO (Score:2)
Re:LMFAO (Score:2)
My opinion was that the marketroid in this case used a lot of words to say almost nothing. I got the "application server" part, everything else was unintelligible.
They did say "XML" a couple times, I know some people who would rush to try it out for that reason.
My favorite part:
I guess it just simplifies complexity in general,
Weird license terms (Score:1)
It's obviously not a free license. However, none of the non-free options you suggested seem to properly describe this particular license. From their license FAQ:
This isn't even "free for non-commercial use" as it disallows also mere execution of "closed source" components. I didn't bother to read their actual license text (who knows, it may even contain viral memes),
Re:Weird license terms (Score:2)
Oops (Score:2)
You're right though about the bogotron nature of proprietary software descriptions. I've long talked about this crucial divide between the two worlds. Back when I worked at SuSE and Enhydra was trying to get into the sort of open source application server kind of space (or whatever it was they were doing), they shared our booth at some trade show. I spent about an hour showing various technical people at their company their fro