The downfalls of uneducated blogging, E-17, and Boards of Canada

Before you even start this post, you must understaod it took some time for me to put it together. So, if you’re gonna even start reading it, you really should finish. I’m going to talk about a bad blog entry I came across, Enlightenment 17 and a very good band.

Let’s start off on the bad foot, with this blog entry I found over at ZDNet blogs. It was posted by Dana Blankenhorn, who I honestly have never heard of – and I suppose there’s a reason why. Dana was posed a question by one of his friends, apparently, about selling code under the GPL License. You see, he had taken an open source program and developed it further – this is a very common, and well accepted, part of the open source world. He now wanted to sell his work to recoup some of the development costs, and apparently came to Dana to find out if this was allowed under the GPL. Dana, for a reason unbeknownst to the rest of us, told his friend “no, you can’t”. I’m not sure if he thought he knew what he was talking about, or just didn’t care enough to do any research – even before writing the actual blog entry. Anytime I write an opinion entry on something I make sure I have my facts straight before jumping in. Not checking facts has been the one black mark on the blogging world – given a lot of “bloggers” are your 13 year old neighbor, and aren’t posting about anything but how their best friend is now dating their ex and what ever happened at lunch today. “Oh my gawd, he was like, totally trying to kiss me, and…” – but enough of that. Disclaimer: I am not comparing Dana’s blog entry to that of a 13 year old girl, I’m just being humorous, so you can laugh at it. Back to the point, Dana’s original premise for his perspective is incorrect – a simple Google search for General Public License would give you a direct link to a browser-friendly version of it. I’m not one for legal documents, so I jumped straight to the FAQ‘s, scrolled a bit and found: Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money? The answer clearly states:

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

Imagine that! You can sell your work. Sorry Dana, but 2 minutes with Google would have stopped your heartache that you’ll inevitably have after all the open source zealots and advocates get done with you. Just remember, you brought it upon yourself by not googling – don’t worry, it’s a common mistake, you’ll learn.

Onward and upward! I’ve been keeping an eye on the development of Enlightenment 17 (website seems to be down at the time of this writing). Another good site for it is get-e.org. I’ve been using it for a few days now and there has been a lot of improvement since the last time I used it a few months ago. You can see Eclair in the screenshot – it’s the media player, currently playing Boards of Canada. Another nice new feature that I just found is the beginnings of a nice little Configuration Panel. The whole experience feels very refined, and you can’t forget the eye candy. Icons on the bar at the bottom “pulse” out towards you, shadows, moving backgrounds. The developers are doing well and I seriously can’t wait until this finally becomes a stable release. It should be very nice by that point.

Lastly, I want to put in a little something about the Boards of Canada. I’ve known of them for a while but have not given them due attention until after the release of their most recent, The Campfire Headphase. It seems like almost any mood I’m in, their music has something in it to match. I have a lot of respect for those two guys now.

Well, folks, that’s all for tonight. I’m hungry, and this blog post took even longer because linux_learner wanted me to help him debug some sort of smart/python/rpm problem in #musb. I didn’t really help much because I don’t have much experience with tracebacks, but I did my best. That’s how it goes, right?