Open Source/Closed Standards

In the quest to open source java, it should be the trademark that depends on passing a test suite.

An example which hits the difference: a nonconfirming "John's Java" would be illegal unless I call it something different, but borrowing a linked list implementation for my embedded linux toaster project would be fine. I'd think that trademark affects the big players here more than copyright.

I'm responding to this O' Reilly blog entry.

Complex Systems

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
--John Gall

GPL better and worse than you thought

Worse, for two reasons:

• Anyone can modify GPL'ed software to give it an interface for interacting with proprietary software. Those modifications can even be GPL'ed :).
• Anyone can distribute proprietary software which links to GPL'ed software. The proprietary author can claim that his software could instead link to a non-GPL'ed implementation of the interface. It's the user that is performing the linkage, and since the GPL only restricts distribution, he certainly isn't culpable.

Now these reasons only apply to re-use of GPL software with other software. Improvements to GPL'ed software should still be illegal to make proprietary.

If the GPL doesn't prevent proprietary re-use, maybe maintenance costs do. Proprietary projects will have to port their software to new releases of the free software without support, because the the free projects can't incorporate their changes.

Both gcc and the linux kernel appear to benefit from this effect. Linus Torvalds has refused to make technical compromises in order to ease the burden of proprietary module writers (even though their work is apparently legal). Richard Stallman has refused to make gcc more flexible lest he encourage proprietary extensions.

Better, because free software is actually less susceptible to patent litigation.

As a complete non sequitur, free software is an antidote to lock-in.

HTML Screenscraping

Cool tool idea: an api that exposes the way a web page appears to a human viewer.

Such a tool would have ways to find page elements based on relative size and position with respect to other elements. It would allow grabbing "the same column in the next row of this table".

This would be complicated, of course, by weird formatting hacks whose elements aren't independently visible (like nested tables).

Even more ambitious would be to support touchy-feely things like finding a table by its "title", when that title is really a semantically unrelated, but visually tied element.

Using the tool would be a little frustrating, because it would never perfectly track all possible changes to the presentation of a site (e.g. some data may be moved between pages, or split up into multiple tables in the same page). Nevertheless, I think it would be a huge commercial success. It might also be a nice as component in a semantic web migration framework.