Month: May 2004

I brought this up before (see Movable License and GPL & Movable Type) but either people didn’t listen because Movable Type was free enough, or perhaps because I’m some sort of crackpot, but in the Movable Type license is this bit:

Term, Termination, and Modification. You may use the Software under this Agreement until either party terminates this Agreement as set forth in this paragraph. Either party may terminate the Agreement at any time, upon written notice to the other party. Upon termination, all licenses granted to you will terminate, and you will immediately uninstall and cease all use of the Software. The Sections entitled "Title," "No Warranty," "Indemnification," "Limitation of Liability," and "General" will survive any termination of this Agreement.
Six Apart may modify the Software and this Agreement with notice to you either in email or by publishing content on the Six Apart Website, including but not limited to charging fees for the Software, changing the functionality or appearance of the Software, and such modification will become binding on you unless you terminate this Agreement.

As everyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about says, I am not a lawyer, but to me it appears that Six Apart can, at anytime, terminate the license you have, and force you to delete the software. It also seems to say that Six Apart can change the license (“Agreement”) at anytime simply by posting something on the Six Apart web site. This is a wakeup call to people who have said they can do whatever they want with their copy of version 2.x of Movable Type.

So, am I a crackpot, or am I reading this right? I know, they won’t do it, they’re nice people! Right? Sure… I mean, I’m you’re friend, you can trust me. I promise I won’t stab you, but I might. I probably won’t… but you know, I might in the future…

I will once again reiterate. I think Movable Type is a nice piece of software, and Six Apart’s founders Ben and Mena seem like nice people, but the license just doesn’t work for me. That is all. If it works for you, hey, that’s cool, use the software, just know what you are getting into when you agree to something. (Oh, feel free to plug the URL of the current license into the WaybackMachine, you’ll find slightly different versions of the license, but they’re all similar enough, this isn’t something new.

Oh, one more thing, I think this part is new, but don’t let your kids use Movable Type, as the license also states:

The Software is not intended for use by persons under the age of 13 and may not be used anyone under such age.

So if you let your children use Movable Type, you violate the license. Heck, it might even mean that if a 12 year old leaves a comment on your Movable Type-powered site you’ve viloated the license. Who knows?

Are we starting to see the importance of licenses?

So I took some time off, had a rummage sale, upgraded to Panther, and when I come back what happens? Everything has gone all crazy…

Well, ok, everything didn’t go crazy, and really, it’s all about freedom.

See, while I took a look at Movable Type years ago, I decided it wasn’t free enough. I even went so far as to correct anyone who might have claimed MT was “open-source” because it wasn’t. In fact it had a license that was disturbing to me, in that it seemed to indicate Six Apart could terminate it at any point and force you to stop using it. That bothered me enough to not use it. I didn’t want to use it personally, and I couldn’t recommend it to commercial entities, as I thought it was too risky.

People love(d) Movable Type though, and as Mark explains, it’s partly because it was “free enough”. and it was for most people. But not for me, so I didn’t use it. Simple, eh?

Now I hear all sorts of complaints because all sorts of people are upset about the changes Six Apart is implementing for version 3.0 of Movable Type. First of all, I say “Good Luck” to Six Apart, I wish them the best, they seem to be doing what they love to do, create software, and make a living at it. I wouldn’t turn that down if the money was right and it didn’t frustrate the hell out of me. Six Apart seem like decent people, and like a decent company, but no matter who you are or what you do, at some point someone will think you are evil. Google, Blogger, Microsoft, Apple, doesn’t matter – if you do something and people don’t like it, you’re evil. Even if you do nothing you’ll be called evil for stagnating, or not changing the spec, even if it’s not a spec, or something… It’s just the way it goes. So now Six Apart is evil because of their licensing and pricing options. Next month it’ll be someone else who is evil. Maybe it’s because money is evil and any commercial entity has to make money, so they have to make evil. I don’t know…

I tried out WordPress last year, and liked it. It’s similar to Movable Type, but is released under the GPL (yay!) and written in PHP (oh well.) Just kidding, nothing wrong with PHP, I just tend to prefer Perl. So what? I’ll probably still end up using WordPress because it’s a great piece of software, I like the people behind it, and it’s GPL’d, so the future is assured.

Speaking of assuring the future, Dave tells us the Frontier kernel will be released under some open-source license. This is the one thing that could actually get me involved in Frontier again. Freedom? Control? Freedom to do what I might want to do, and not worry about the control of UserLand? Oooh, that’s exciting. I’ll be watching this one, as I’m still not sure what it all means, even after reading all 3 FAQ‘s.

So the big question is, do we make a trade off between evil and not evil, between commercial software and systems that can become evil, and open-source software and systems that hopefully cannot become evil, and at what price? I will switch from the slightly-evil Mac OS X to an open-source, future-assured operating system like Linux when I am completely comfortable with using it, and when it does almost everything I need to do almost as good as Mac OS X.

Until then, let the evil continue, in small doses, where appropriate.

When it comes to Linux, I’ve mainly used Red Hat on Intel hardware, and on PPC many attempts were made to install LinuxPPC, and that never worked (well, it was 4 years ago) but I have used Yellow Dog successfully…

As much as I have tried to install Debian on PPC, I’ve never managed to get X11 to work, which is ok for a server, but I want a workstation. So, which distro should I try? penguinppc.org lists some distros, as does LinuxISO.org. I’m tempted to try Mandrake or Gentoo. I would try SuSE if I could find their PPC distro., but the fact I have to hunt around for it makes it last on my list.

If you’ve got any helpful advice on Linux for PPC, please let me know…

I now have notes on installing and configuring FreeTDS on Mac OS X to work with Perl and Microsoft SQL Server 2000… Which, you know, you might have to do if you’re a Perl hacker using Mac OS X in a shop with Windows guys and SQL servers…

See: FreeTDS Notes