Monday, May 21, 2001

Sheesh, I’m getting behind in my diary entries.

Sunday was quite uneventful, though. After an excellent service in the morning at The Falls Church, and a sermon on fasting, I spent most of the (drizzly) day mucking about with AtheOS programming and writing.

Well, that’s not really true. Saalon shot me a heartfelt e-mail about an argument we’d had the night before over a script he wrote. He felt worried and just sort of lost as a result, and wanted to make his feelings known to me. We sat down and had a good heart-to-heart talk.

…And then I brought up the GNU Public License, and got into another heated argument about the nature of rights and freedom in software. I’m embarrassed to admit that I got hot under the collar, but after I backed down we had a really good discussion.

I had been operating under a false impression of the nature of the GPL. I hadn’t understood that the GPL simply says that the source code to a GPL’ed app must be provided upon request (or along with the compiled binary).

This doesn’t keep anyone from making money off of an application, though obviously it’s a questionable choice for a commercial developer. Though when you consider that distributing a compiled copy of a commercial app would be illegal and operate as warez, I wonder how much damage it would do. I mean, people already warez software; providing the source code wouldn’t necessarily make the warez any easier to find. It’d have to stay “under the radar,” which is where warez is anyway.

In any event, I’ve been moving forward on all three of my AtheOS projects:

• “Paste,” a tool for setting the desktop wallpaper. I can’t figure out how to implement a ListView, though, which is a major functionality limitation. I’ve asked for help from the atheos-developer mailing list, so once I’ve heard back from them, I can move forward.
• Clio, an AtheOS word processor I’m designing.
• The Syllable User Bible, a repository for AtheOS and Syllable documentation. I really should announce it to the community, now; it has a decent amount of content. Much of it’s cribbed from my About.com BeOS programming articles.

…And I just found out that my back-ordered copy of Yoshitoshi ABe‘s artbook Essence has begun shipping. Yeehaw!

Writing Thoughts

Mon

Brennen was kind enough to give me feedback on “Anime Explained.” I made a lot of the changes he recommended, and printed out the result. I want to read it again tomorrow night, on paper, and see how it flows.

I still need to add a section about the positive aspects of anime (as suggested by Saalon), but that can wait. I also want to re-word the article to have a friendlier and more relaxed tone than it does now. Reading a paper copy should help me with that goal.

Once I’ve completed those changes — which shouldn’t take too long — I’ll be ready to submit it.