This approach may be inline with views expressed by Richard Stallman in an interesting article on Copyright by the title “Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors” (1). Referring to copyright on software he writes “In my own field, computer programming, three years should suffice”. Stallman does not reject copyright as a concept but is interested in “Finding the right bargain”.

Possibly the most well known scheme for developing Free Software profitably is that of charging for related services. The problem is this model requires business skills most software developers do not have and is often not even applicable.

With Delayed Release, software developers may have easier time developing Free Software profitably, leading to increase in production of Free Software. Once people find that ideals of Free Software can practically co-exist with their realities, those ideals will have easier time spreading.

(1) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

Interface of rfoo.marsh

rfoo.marsh.dumps(expression)
rfoo.marsh.loads(binary_string)

Serve RPC method to clients

class MyHandler(rfoo.BaseHandler):
    def echo(self, str):
        return str

rfoo.InetServer(MyHandler).start(port=50000)

Call method on RPC server

c = rfoo.InetConnection().connect(port=50000)
rfoo.Proxy(c).echo('Hello, world!')

Today I visited the Winpdb Google Group and was shocked to see it was swamped with SPAM. I never got notifications for any of that SPAM. So, I thought what the hell, I will clear the mess in a second. I was in for a surprise. Google Groups admin panel is the worst ever created for a web service. To delete each SPAM message you need to click five (!) links, and if you also want to report the message as SPAM you need to click once more. you can’t select several discussions or messages or delete all message by a bot author.

The team members who created Google Groups should be sent to Siberia and never allowed to touch a computer again.

I started jpc trying to figure out why an existing Python RPC package was slow and before long I found myself hacking at a new package.

On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo laptop it can start/end 4000 new local TCP connections, handle 13,000 local RPC calls and 40,000 JSON-RPC notifications per second per process. Here is an example:

# Serve a method to clients

class MyHandler(jpc.BaseHandler):
    def echo(self, str):
        return str

jpc.start_server(host='localhost', port=50000, handler=MyHandler)

# Call a method on server

c = jpc.connect(host='localhost', port=50000)
jpc.Proxy(c).echo('Hello, world!')

Some notable Free Software projects are therefore:
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.gnome.org/
http://kde.org/

There are of course many others and please comment with your favorite ones, but in fact, if you try to think of a recent notable FOSS project and check out its website you are most likely to find it is an Open Source project rather than Free Software.

For example, Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Drupal, Firefox, Ubuntu and others.

For those of you who wonder what the difference between Free Software and Open Source is, I recommend the following article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

There can be several reasons why this is the state of Free Software. I believe one of them is that there is no economical energy behind Free Software.

When I was 16 I wrote with a friend an arcade game for the Commodore 64. It was a beautiful piece of software written in Assembler with heart breaking graphics. I dare to say it was one of the most technically advanced games ever developed for the Commodore but although we negotiated with several game publishers it was never released.

This game is now the software equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat experiment. It exists on a 20 years old 5.25 Inch floppy disk inside a plastic box at my parent’s house. There is a probability that it is still intact, but touch that diskette and it is gone forever.

Such is the fate of all software.

I think this technology is actually being used against the people. You can not use it without being completely exposed. Anyone using it is being monitored and ironically has his/her social network mapped. Once someone is determined to be an organizer or worth the effort of taking down, he/she can be easily arrested.

Both memory usage and CPU load are annoyingly high. Firefox has about 5-10 open tabs and needs restarting every day or so unless it crashes unexpectedly.

I typically need to close an application to start another if I don’t want the disk to start trashing around indefinitely.

Can anyone explain why on earth does a browser need 1.7GB of virtual memory to run 10 tabs and why does a code editor need 1.2GB to keep 10 files in memory? Is this anything less than utterly ridiculous?

Here is a slightly edited output from top:

VIRT  RES  SHR  %CPU %MEM COMMAND
1719m 736m 33m  29   24.6 firefox
1247m 514m 14m  0    17.2 netbeans
483m  67m  9508 5    2.3  Xorg
301m  48m  3700 0    1.6  apache2
301m  45m  4500 0    1.5  apache2
316m  39m  4496 0    1.3  apache2