Removing GPL code

This is an interesting question I have after reading about MonoDevelop removing GPL code:

I have this application which I license under the terms of BSD, and I saw a GPL library (lets call it libbar ) which might help me. I incorporate the library by dinamic linking. Now my application is effectly a GPL binary, sweet.

Now, I write myself a new replacement library and release it under the terms of BSD. I replace the old "legacy" library by my new one.

Scenario 1:
Lets assume, my application uses (derives classes, whatever) code from libbar. If I remove the GPL code and change it by BSD code - my work even tough it does not contain GPL code - it's a derived work, due to compile time constrains. Am I correct?

Scenario 2:
Lets assume that libbar, uses abstract classes/methods from libfoo (which is BSD). Lets assume that my application uses the interfaces exposed in libfoo, then libbar  extends those interfaces, and I am not directly using libbar. When I use my new BSD library, my application is not compiled against any GPL code (just linked to) and it never used it directly. My old code was GPL by run-time constrains and, and the new one is BSD. Am I correct?

The problem wuth scenario 2, is that even if I am wrong, and my BSD code is "forced" to be GPL, this would not held in court. I still remember the wifi drivers issue the freebsd guys had (openbsd? a link in the comments would be a good idea...)

KDE on Windows - making life easier

I just installed on my mom's Desktop KDE games. Now she is happier, and she does not need to touch my computer.

On the laptop I got from work (Windows XP, because of non-supported hardware) I just installed KDE4 as well. Using Konversation on Windows just kicks ass. Kate is by far the best general purpose text editor I used. I am not happy that Okular on 4.3.2 does not open PDF (4.3.0 and 4.2 did open.... funky...), but as soon as it starts working again, it will become my default PDF viewer.

While I think Dolphin is GREAT and I started using back in KDE3, I cannot use it on windows, since sftp:// or fish:// protocols not working there... it's just so sad ... :(

I just wanted to thank the KDE on windows team: great job. Just fix the default colors on XP, the applations look kinda dark. That's all!

Dear lazy web: cannot clone from gitorious

I am trying to clone Qt (and qt-creator) in my hone, and I am getting this (please don't laugh, I know it's Windows...)

diego@BRAIN /c/src
$ rm -fr qt && time git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git
Initialized empty Git repository in c:/src/qt/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 218976, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (56957/56957), done.
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly.68 MiB | 5 KiB/s
fatal: early EOF

real    41m40.578s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.000s

Now, it only happens at home where my ISP is making nice tricks and probably killing everything that is not "http" (note how slow it works, 1kbs to 5kbs). Just to compare, in my workplace with a business contract I can pull at normally (at 100-180kbs).

Any tricks? I was thinking of using a ppptp connection to work, and then pull from that (or even ssh), but I am sure that there are workarounds for this issue. Yes, I tried http, this is what I get:

diego@BRAIN /c/src
$ rm -fr qt && time git clone http://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git
Initialized empty Git repository in c:/src/qt/.git/
fatal: http://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git/info/refs not found: did you run git updat
e-server-info on the server?

real    0m1.953s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.000s

Any good ideas/workarounds/solutions...?

Linus is always right

Linus is always right: SVN users are stupids, GIT is superior. I am now starting to move my personal projects from SVN to GIT. When doing local development, GIT is by FAR much better then SVN: easier to setup ("git init" and you are done, and SVN?), it's the fast and it's branches are super cool. So, lets use it.

In order to learn how to use GIT, the best way is to use it. So I decided to start helping again in Arora (which is hosted in github). The result is that the next version will have a nice RTL user interface (I must admit, the bridge between JS and C++ in Qt is really cool), and you can also have i18n without installing the application. A nice side effect is that you can have local translations (different then the ones in /usr/local/arora/* in ~/.arora/i18n). This may help translators, to finish the translations of the applicaiton, even if they installed from source. If not in practice, at least in theory as the code is more or less there.

Back when I was studying, I had this class which was called "data mining", in which we learned a few clusterization algorithms (KMeans, PAM and a few others). We were given an exercise: to code a program that implements Clara. I decided to code this in Qt4, using QWT. As an exercise, I decided to clean it up, and save it in a git repository. I just finished uploading the project to github, and I am also planing a few other changes (move the code from the Qt containers to STL). The code is GPL3, so feel free to use and abuse. The dataset code is self containing and soon will have no dependency on Qt, so it may be-reused in other projects.

Since this is the KDE planet, here is the mandatory screen shot:

Stackoverflow and Konqueror

As a huge fan of stackoverflow.com and one that is trying to reduce his usage of Firefox (Konqueror is faster, consumes less memory and looks more native) I had problem browsing to this given site.

When you try and associate the Google account with your stackoverflow account, I was redirected to the front page and I was not recognized. Today, I tried identifying Konqueror as Firefox2 (from Tools/Change Browser Identification) and I was able to login. When I was logged in I removed the false identification and the site is working perfectly. SWEET.

GMail almost works when you identify as Firefox2. The new user interface does not work (you cannot change... directories? folders?) and the chat does not work even with FF2 enabled.
This might work if I identify as a newer Safari... who knows...

This means Google are spoofing for specific browsers and hacking around problems (which do not exactly exist). Anyway, the user agents strings might need a little update... it's like they are stacked in the remote past... when we actually needed to spoof the browser identification ....wait.... what?

A reason to keep KHTML

I have read that people are not happy about KHTML. As one who spoke once against KHTML, and pro QtWebKit (or QWebKit?). This is why I want to keep KHTML:

Native widgets. Not emulated like WebKit/Gecko, but real Qt widgets. This means that I can have a text widget which fully supports BiDi (not gecko, not webkit, only IE has one... and KHTML).

Also, widgets get drawed funky if the direction of the page is opposite to the direction of your desktop on WebKit (you can see it in chrome, Arora and Safari). For example see the combo boxes in http://www.aljazeera.net/Portal.

Still, I think that KHTML is not something we can handle today. Sorry, even tough KHTML is great, WebKit is what the market needs, it's what we as a community need.

QDevelop 0.27 is out

Get it while it's hot! QDevelop 0.27 has been released!

Sources and builds for Linux/Windows are avialable at the GoogleCode project, as always: http://code.google.com/p/qdevelop/downloads/list

Removed Hebrew translations of Plasma 4.2.1

I just removed the Hebrew translation of plasma from the 4.2 branch, which means only plasma will not be translated to Hebrew. The reason, is that QGraphicsScene does not support RTL interfaces in Qt 4.4, and it's still not sure if KDE 4.2 does support Qt 4.5. Even if it does, it's still not tested.

If KDE 4.2 will work with Qt 4.5, the translation will get pulled from trunk again.

I hope that no more files need to be remove, otherwise I am afraid of going bellow 85% and in theory Hebrew will not be a supported language.