Quite a lot of development has been going on at SkyOS. After receiving a test ATI Radeon video card, lead OS coder Robert has created a driver that allows for hardware acceleration. Additionally, the new “Message Notification” system has been completed, and screenshots can be seen at the SkyOS homepage. Finally, Lycander, a member of the software development team, has finished porting GLib 2.0 to SkyOS.
SkyOS News: ATI driver, Notification Window, GLib 2.0
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
hooray for SkyOS development speed
It’s looking sexier and sexier all the time.
Is this sentence …
“Quite a lot of development has been going on at SkyOS”
qualify as a pleonasm ?
I like the idea of the notification window very much,.. well done. Keep up innovating
Where does Robert find the time? This guy is a coding machine!
Robert and I generally work with each other for about 3-4 hours a night on this. We decide what we need to do next, I made what graphics are necessary, and then he puts them in. Usually while I am making up graphics, he is either coding something else in, or being otherwise productive (i.e. implementing the new page design I sent him).
The unfortunate side of it is that, with our timezones being about 8 hours apart, it makes our hours a little funky. Robert generally starts right when he wakes up, while I stay up until about 5-6am working with him.
Its an interesting arrangement, to say the least. =)
This is a very promising OS.
As a relentless pessimist I have to wonder how long it will be before they start charging/are bought out/or get squished by you know who.
Wow, that notification window is a good idea. I was a bit pessimistic about the SkyOS GUI when I saw all the submissions for the contest. With more ideas like this, though, it might actually turn into something both good and innovative.
…operating system. the new GUI is very pretty and the notification window is a very good idea. keep up the good work!!
I wish that we had a video that we could show you guys of SkyOS 5.0 in action. When I get a new video card, I’m going to try and do a video capture if I can. Its really quite impressive to see the taskbar resizing on the fly, or see the notification window slide up from the bottom of the screen when something is detected.
When I look at SkyOS, I can’t help but feel that me and my two little projects are playing the San Francisco street artist to Robert’s Picasso. I don’t know whether to be glad people with this much skill exist, or intimidated beyond belief.
Anyway, SkyOS just looks better and better every time I look at it. All other issues aside, is the plan for it to remain free as in beer, but closed-source? I’m fine with closed-source software, I’m just wondering if Robert is planning on charging for SkyOS when 5.0 is ready to go to the public.
I just want to point out that the GLib port is not quite a complete port. Certain routines are “broken” because they make calls to functions that are not yet supported in SkyOS. More importantly, libiconv hasn’t been ported yet (which will be on my to do list) so iconv calls throughout GLib have been commented out. I’ll continue to work on updating this GLib port for completeness, but as it stands right now the majority of functionality should work.
http://www.ly-tech.com/sky-glib.htm for more details.
The whole point of this is to make it easier for us to port other open source apps, such as GAIM which is my next goal.
I think OpenBeOS et al. could learn a thing or 2 from this project. Robert gets a new video card and a week later, there’s a fully 2c acc. driver for it.
Eat your heart out OSBOS!
Muchos kudos to Robert.
These guys just keep chugging along. Congratulations!
Awesome. awesome awesome awesome.
Are the icons going to remain on the left of the desktop? I’m a big fan of having them on the right (I know, I know, I can move them when the time scomes).
Secondly, are the notifications windows going to be that grey in the final version? They seem a bit dark compared to the rest of the new theme
Wow! SkyOS looks great. As soon as it has some software written for it or ported to it, I might start using it. It really needs a decent web browser. Maybe Galeon or K-Meleon could be ported to it? That would be cool.
To The Pessimist:
I don’t think that sentence qualifies as pleonasm. It contains no redundancy.
“To The Pessimist:
I don’t think that sentence qualifies as pleonasm. It contains no redundancy.”
That was just a joke 🙂
Even tho, at some point, putting “Quite a lot of development” and “SkyOS” in the same sentence kinda constitute redundancy 🙂
Stug: Yes, I feel the same way about the color. Ultimately I would like to see it have some transparency, which would lighten the color of the gray. But of course there is the performance tradeoff. Robert and I are still working on the fine details. =)
Hopefully my sentence didn’t qualify as pleonasm. Me haves pride for me’s good vocabulary. =D
http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/ux/default.aspx?pu…
^ This is where the notification window idea came from. Yup, MS Research.
To be fair, the popup thing was in the mockup design before that MSDN article was put up. It just makes sense as a UI feature, rather than a popup window in the middle of the screen.
That article was posted in October 2003. Our design was submitted to us in late August/early September. Furthermore, I’ve never seen that page in my life, nor was I even aware of such a feature in Longhorn. Interesting read though, thanks for the link.
and I will say it again….This guy is unbelievable. SkyOS makes progress at such a rapid rate it is mind boggling.
-G
I don’t see how this is really different from the notifications KDE pops up in my system tray when a new song starts in Noatun or when I get an IM message from my friend. The window looks very pretty, and they’ve got some more control over acknowledgement, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally different. KDE notification mechanism has been around since KDE 2.0 as I remember.
Slicker has also had a notification area (that supports stuff like queuing multiple apps and user-configurable priority levels) in its design for a long time. This MSDN article was published October 2003, which means that the Slicker stuff has published much earlier.
I don’t think either KDE or Slicker or Longhorn are the first to have a feature like this. So close, but no cigar
At this dev rate SkyOS will have 150 graphics cards supported in roughly (3) years;) – seriously though great work!
From the SKYOS website…
The scheduler is a priority based, round robin scheduler, which is able to schedule as much tasks as wanted. (No task limitation).
For a more detailed explanation of the scheduler read the SkyOS Scheduler documentation.
Are there disadvantages to this? If there are I am sure you will improve them at some future date.
Well as long as Roberts and our MP3’s work, who cares right?
:B
There IS a fully 2d accelerated driver for the GeForce series and the ati series…
poaah
theses guys are a bit too leet for the rest of us
when is it ready ?
keep it up ! it’s excellent !
I’ve heard rumours SkyOS has made modifications to several GNU programs without offering the modified source. Is this true? If so, I hope that they will change this soon. It’s one thing to just offer a closed-source operating system, but taking advantage of GPL software and then refusing to give the changes back to the community is low.
The developer is a just sloppy. Apparently, SkyNet uses KHTML code, but the source to the 4.0a version hasn’t been released. Somebody on the KDE list pointed this out, but he says he has lost the code for the 4.0a version so he can’t distribute them. Legally, this means that he can’t distribute the 4.0 binaries at all, because he would be infringing on the copyright owned by the KHTML developers. The KDE developers, however, are being pretty lenient about this, they basically gave him a warning and said that the upcoming 5.0 version must be shipped with the code. You can bet that if the infringing code was a commercial company’s, he’d be sued to all hell.
I hadn’t heard about other GPL violations. If that’s the case, he really needs to get on the ball. Engineers might not like legal issues, but that doesn’t free them from having to deal with them.
Geez, I seems like every time people have a forum to discuss SkyOS, a couple ‘a trolls start flooding with claims that Sky is in violation of the GPL. On the Sky forum, Rob said he would release any and all required source in the next release. Until recently, the system has been mostly just a hobby project, so Robert didn’t save the source.
Not only have we stated, many times, that we will have source code for the few GPL applications we use available upon release of SkyOS 5.0, but we have also received permission from every development team we have talked to so far whose code we used to do this. As was pointed out, this was just a small hobby OS until the last few months, and Robert just kept using the source that he used for previous versions to start on the next versions. He had no need for a CVS system because there was only one person working on the project.
We offer on our page the source code to all 5.0 applications. We have all intentions to send source to anyone who requests once 5.0 is released. We have talked to a number of groups whose code we use, and all have been very supportive and understanding (including the FSF). No one has a problem with the situation except for the few people who continue to bring this issue up. I don’t know why a few people continue to focus on this when everyone, including the developers that these people are supposedly worried about, have said everything is kosher. I can only surmise that they must wish ill-will on us, and that is quite unfortunate.
People keep bringing it up because it keeps being an issue. If you guys would be more careful, it wouldn’t happen. Saying it “was just a small hobby OS” isn’t really an excuse. No matter how small you are, you have to pay attention to copyright. Even at school, not properly citing a source in a paper lands me in the Dean’s office for academic misconduct. Its just the world we live in. If you can afford the time to code a web browser, you certainly can afford the time to make sure you are complaint with the main external license of the browser.
Look, the GPL community has reason to be paranoid. GPL violations happen more often than they should. GPL’ed code is protected by the community because it essentially belongs to the community. You have no right to get angry when they see something wrong and take steps to correct it. Its great that you’ve contacted the relevant parties and they are supportive, but do realize that they are only doing that out of good will, and a commercial company would almost certainly have sued you. I don’t think anybody wishes you or your project any ill-will, we’re just trying to make sure that everything is on the up-and-up.
PS> You should really post that you’re aware of the situation and that you’ve contacted the copyright holders as a news item on your site. That’ll certainly stop any otherwise well-meaning people from bothering you about perceived copyright issues.
I appreciate that you care so much about the GPL, but the fact of the matter is that we have contacted the parties who it concerns, and they have been very understanding of our situation. I’m not trying to make an excuse here, I’m trying my best to give you an explanation as to what the circumstance was. What is your purpose in furthering this discussion? Are you trying to make us say that we should have had the source available? We were the first to concede that point. Are you trying to say that we should get in contact with the groups whose code we used? Done, all that we were able to reach understood the circumstance and agreed to our solution.
When you say that a lot of people are badgering us about this, that is very misrepresentative of the situation. Just to put things into perspective, we have around 1,500 unique visitors to our website a day. We have had a total of 7 people complain about the situation, and that is including yourself. Seven out of 1,500 people are trying to debate this situation. It seems like just about everyone understands what we are doing and has moved on. Why do you find this to be such a challenge?
You said in your post:
“You have no right to get angry when they see something wrong and take steps to correct it.”
I have to ask you, what are you trying to correct? Are you trying to make us release the source in the future? We already have that planned, and have a written offer available right now (and have for quite some time). Are you trying to get us to admit that we made a mistake? We already did that, and have corrected it for the future. Are you trying to make us contact involved parties to get their input on what we should do? Once again, we have done this, and everyone we have been able to contact thus far has had no qualms with our plans.
So I ask you, why are you still debating this? Is this really still an issue, or are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
Will you please stop talking about the damned licensing in each and every skyos story? It is getting very tiring. Get on topic please.
I didn’t say that lots of people were bothering you about it, you did. You’re the one who posted asking why people kept bringing it up in every discussion about SkyOS. I simply answered your question. My response wasn’t intended to generate further discussion, but to simply answer Chris’s question. I pointed out the fact that the KDE developers, anyway, knew about the situation and were okay with it. Now that things seem more or less resolved, I don’t see the problem. Its the same as the EULA thing that popped up before: there was a problem, you addressed it, and now everything is peachy.
FYI: There seems to be a lot of misconceptions on your forum. In particular, you (and I’m not referring to you specifically, but to the people on the board generally) seem to have treated Chris rather badly when he made a request that was perfectly within his rights. He got accused or trying to paint you guys as an enemy of the GPL, got a lot of crap about “do you really want to do anything with the source?”, etc. He said nothing to deserve that. More worrisome:
“I guess that’s your way of saying “thank you” for us taking the time to let you know what steps we’ve taken to become GPL compliant”
Its not a matter of thanking you for GPL compliance. Copyright is the *law*. Nobody thanks you for obeying the law. The copyright holders would have been perfectly within their rights to stop you from distributing SkyOS entirely until you could deliver source code. The fact they didn’t was just kindness on their parts. The SkyOS developers should just say “sorry guys, we f*ed up, we talked with everyone involved and set everything straight” instead of dodging the issue (even as late as the middle of Nov. Robert said that SkyOS did not violate the GPL at all, even though 4.0a was released two months earlier), making incorrect claims (like saying that the GPL doesn’t specify any time requirements), and generally being obnoxious to anybody who asked.
Like I said, let’s just put this whole thing in the dust-bin where it belongs. But I seriously hope this was a learning experience for the SkyOS team, and that they adopt a more respectful attitude towards the GPL as a result.
this whole licensing crap is outdated. This sueing crap is outdated too.
for your information, rayiner: in Europe, where Robert lives, no one can be sued for using/reusing code, another one has written, no matter which american license may be put on it. Further: the “hobby os project” *IS* a very appropriate excuse. I for my part am doing a much smaller os project called BlueIllusion, and there is no such thing like keeping older sources for anything else than continuing development. So, the conlusion: If you don’t grasp the amount of work that is put in such a thing, pls don’t come along with such things like that GPL. Your sentence about “if one has the time to code a html browser, he has the time to think over legal issues too” is pretty inappropriate. Here in Austria, we don’t have to think about such things, if we do private things in our spare time which we offer then en gratuit to the community for free use.
being paranoid? Ah, yes,fine. In EU there doesn’t exist anything like software patents(they wanted to do this but it didn’t work out). This is something that belongs *solely* to the USA, as well as the GPL.
and as eugenia says: each and every post about skyos is spoiled with this licensing filth. It’s ridiculous and annoying as hell.
and as eugenia says: each and every post about skyos is spoiled with this licensing filth. It’s ridiculous and annoying as hell.
Well, it’s very annoy when the developers don’t respect author’s copyright. Even, the author gave no cost of source codes, so what more do you want when you don’t want to follow the copyright?
Of course the holy grail of copyright …
I respect copyright, you understand?
But if someone comes along claiming copyright on normal, each day used things which each and everbody uses the same way too (like linked lists management code or bubble sort), then we land in devils kitchen, thats for sure.And this, I do not respect.
Robert is unstopable. cain’t wait for Gaim on skyos!
this whole licensing crap is outdated. This sueing crap is outdated too.
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Oh, I vote property rights next! Let’s get rid of the fundamentals of capitalistic procedure one by one. Look, licensing is important for the same reason property rights are important. They are fundamental to allowing a free market to work. Its economics 101. People draw the line at different places (limited patent length, software, patents, etc), but not even RMS claims that licensing in general is outdated.
for your information, rayiner: in Europe, where Robert lives, no one can be sued for using/reusing code, another one has written, no matter which american license may be put on it.
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Copyright is international. By the Berne convention, Robert is liable for violating the copyright of owners living in any other Berne convention country. Besides, a lot of GPL patent holders (specifically the KHTML ones) are European.
Further: the “hobby os project” *IS* a very appropriate excuse.
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If I took the pictures and content of OSNews and published it as my own site, would it “being a hobby site” be an appropriate excuse? Because that’s *exactly* the law that I’d be breaking if I used GPL’ed code in a “hobby OS” without following the license. More generally, is pirating Photoshop appropriate if I just use it for hobby use? How about pirating games? Where do you draw the line between who has to follow the law and who doesn’t?
I for my part am doing a much smaller os project called BlueIllusion, and there is no such thing like keeping older sources for anything else than continuing development.
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I suggest you check out Subversion or CVS, for your own sanity. I do a lot of “hobby” code for my personal use, and it all gets checked into Subversion. Heck, even my english papers get checked into Subversion. Besides, I don’t buy this “its too hard” crap. It takes 1 minute to read the licensing conditions of a component. It takes another minute to tar up the sources and distribute them with the binaries. Thousands of developers manage to play nice with the GPL every day — its really not that hard.
So, the conlusion: If you don’t grasp the amount of work that is put in such a thing,
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Oh I do. I work as a programmer. We use a lot of third party software, and so it is important for me to be careful about third-party licenses. And unlike most OSS people, commercial companies don’t hesitate to sue you for license violations.
In EU there doesn’t exist anything like software patents
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This isn’t a patent. Its a copyright. They are two completely different things.
You can’t claim copyright on bubble-sort. Are you sure you’re not mistaking them for software patents? Copyright applies to actual copied code. There is a limit for how much copying is considered copying, but even something like a linked list can be several hundred lines if it is a well-tuned and well-featured implementation. However, this isn’t even about something simple like a linked-list. Why would anyone copy a GPL’ed linked list implementation? There are millions on the internet. Its about much larger components, like KHTML.
for your information, rayiner: in Europe, where Robert lives, no one can be sued for using/reusing code, another one has written, no matter which american license may be put on it.
Good Lord. Tom, you show a distinct lack of understanding of simple Copyright law. I would suggest you either brush up and make an effort to understand it now or stop using Open Source code in any of your projects until you are totally sure you do understand EU Copyright law. You might also want to check out the differences between Patents & Copyright as well as basic licences and Contract law. You do have to concern yourself “with such things” and you are placing yourself at risk if you are ignorant of the law or choose to ignore it. Don’t do that.
Back on topic, I do wish I had some more time & my second PC was working. I was donated a Radeon 9200 in order to port a Radeon driver for Syllable but havn’t even started yet. I don’t know what the driver API is like in SkyOS but I should imagine Robert ported the XFree86 driver pretty easily.
The popup messages are an interesting concept, too. I’m not sure I’d use an application error being popped to showcase their capabilities, though!
…do you also have an opinion about skyOS itself? if not, please shut up and let the copyright holders decide how they arrange themselfs with the skyOS developers. i’m fed up with this GPL discussions.
on topic:
as someone else said before, a very important application for skyOS would be a good webbrowser. i’d love to see a gecko based browser on skyos. is there already started work on this from somebody?
Enough Already!!!
I dunno, SkyKruzer is probably pretty good given its based on the KHTML engine. Certainly its decent enough for an alternative OS. Maybe they can sync with the latest “post-Safari” 3.2 tree when its available.
Speaking of drivers, anybody interested in drivers should check out the recent freedesktop.org X server mailing list discussions. There has been a lot of talk about separating accelerated OpenGL support from X (in preparation for an X built on OpenGL). If manufacturers like NVIDIA jump on the freedesktop.org bandwagon, it might be very possible for alternative OSs to port this (probably much smaller and simpler) driver layer and get fully accelerated drivers for free.
Rayiner, I wasn’t the one asking about SkyCruzer. KHTML is a pretty good engine; we use it ourselves in ABrowse. Gecko would be nice, but we don’t have the manpower and I doubt SkyOS has, either.
The idea of seperating OpenGL from X is a good idea but it won’t really help us non-X using OS’s much. Even if nVidia or ATi do decide to use the new architecture, their code is unlikly to be open so we’re stuck with the same situation as we are now E.g. binary Linux kernel modules & binary X drivers.
Writing a wrapper to call into those binary modules is not the problem. What is a problem is that those binary drivers make calls to the OS & X themselves, and providing an X/Linux like wrapper for the binary module to call into is a lot of work.
If you want OpenGL at the moment your best bet is to use Mesa and stick with software rendering. If you get fancy then you can expose a Mesa-like API from the video drivers and implement bits of hardware GL based on the snipets of DRI or E.g. UtahGLX code. It’s hardly ideal but it’d be no worse than any open X driver is currently.
@pennbruder: For your information, I find SkyOS a very impressive project, which grows and seems to need several debugging sessions.
@vanders:
Point taken. 2001/29/EG directive(hope its the right one) – I’ve found in the net. Well. This is Copyright and not Patents. I’m clearly pissed by some attempts to *patent* software. Sorry for not having expressed this clearly. But you are in err if you think I have no understanding of copyright law. It’s my lack of knowledge of crucial expressions causing trouble and misunderstanding here.
@rayiner: You don’t take the ‘too hard crap’, do you? I tell you something: the GPL is written in a that way obsolete english, a non english speaker needs more than one minute to read this piece of paper. A non-native-speaker might fall over crucial parts well hidden behind eloquent formulas of english language. You oughta take this into consideration hm?
your point about the line where one breaks law: this one is simple: Never cross a big companys line. What they consider to be rightful, they do it. they have the money to do it. Look at Microsoft and how they act. And indeed, you are right to point out photoshop and pirated software. It happens way too often and is of course baaad.
But you get my argument in the wrong throat, turn it about 180 degrees and interpret it you own way. I won’t convince you, for you look like one that likes walking well trodden ways. I didn’t say that doing some hobby thing gives the right to infringe copyright and sorts.I have stated that it is not taken into consideration to keep *old* source code. Who needs? Did you take it into consideration from the very *beginning*?
as for CVS & subversion: ‘ve heard ’bout them but not yet looked nearer.
Well, why do I think this licensing thing is out of date: There is so much of it outta there, and too much power it gives in the hands of big enterprises – which then sue down each and everybody who even dares just to *use* what they do.
Why I don’t like GPL: simply the following: “if you use/modify gpl’d software/sourcecode in your own work, your own work has to be gpl’d too, and you are to hand out binaries along with source code” See: It is not sufficient to state where the changed program/source stems from – to give credit where credit is due. You *have* to obey this dinosaur.
as for Berner Convention: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/fsfe-france-gpl/2002-06/msg00007.h… – maybe I didn’t understand something crucial.
And now peace.
I’ve made my point, you’ve made your’s. all right?
stay safe
Must add to the kudos already given in every thread about SkyOS that pops up… the project and the development speed is nothing short of fantastic. Though, even though the graphics looks more and more like the mockups when refering to content the looks aren’t anything near it. How far is it until you guys will have anything near the mockups? Not complaining really, just curious! =)
The shadows on the recent screenshots are much better than the ones earlier. Now they look transparent and not just black. Just my opinion: They should not be that ‘solid’ and sharp. More like the mockups, or in other words, default drop shadow in photoshop!
And… antialiasing on the rounded corners on the windows etc, will that be implementet? Would look so much greater then!
Just some curious questions and opinions, no complaining! Keep up the good work and I’ll soon format a partition on my harddrive for it!
Vanders, a Radeon driver would be very useful & much apprieciated 🙂
(disclaimer: I’ve never touched an ATI card in my life, just musing)
I’m glad there is an OS under development that has a chance to be everything Window is not: stable, easy to use, fast, non-bloat… Very glad to see SkyOS rising.
The coders & creators will find resistance from Microsoft’s agents. Must be strong and put your trust in God, the Lord of might and justice, and work towards the final goal. Maybe that would be, to help the peoples of the world by giving them a way to operate more efficiently and in freedom. Keep up the good work guys.
I can see why you would not want to release the code to the public until you have ironed out the speghetti code and added understandable remarks & stuff in the code so those who view the code will have a higher regard for it.
It’s really starting to come together, can’t wait to see the finished product.
Sandman
P.S. A friendly remind, Please help the troll community, have your GPL trolls Spayed or Neutered.
The GPL license text is available in over 20 languages, although these translations are unofficial. This is basically so that the FSF is not damaged by unofficial translations which may contain holes or inconsistencies of meaning in a foreign court. However, it gives the non-english speaking developer a VERY clear idea of what is required of them.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
If you don’t like the GPL license simply don’t derive or use any code in your own work from GPLd projects. I can’t see how you could possibly have a problem with this.
“I’m glad there is an OS under development that has a chance to be everything Window is not: stable, easy to use, fast, non-bloat… Very glad to see SkyOS rising.”
That’s funny, because Windows IS stable, easy to use, fast and non-bloated (considering the amount of services he provide).
“The coders & creators will find resistance from Microsoft’s agents.”
uh ? So if I build an hobby car in my backyard, multiple agent from Ford and Toyota will try to make my life a living hell ?
Microsoft do not give a crap about hobby OS. They give a crap about *competitors*.
“Must be strong and put your trust in God, the Lord of might and justice, and work towards the final goal.”
What is your god anything to do with this matter ?
“Maybe that would be, to help the peoples of the world by giving them a way to operate more efficiently and in freedom. Keep up the good work guys.”
whooo .. stay on earth here. The guy make this amazing effort for one goal : having fun to create his own OS. I don’t think in his Project Manager document he entered any “humanitarian” and “save the world” goal … 😉
“I can see why you would not want to release the code to the public until you have ironed out the speghetti code and added understandable remarks & stuff in the code so those who view the code will have a higher regard for it.”
That for sure make sense …
Actually, from the looks of it, the whole idea is to seperate the drivers from X competely, and provide any services needed by the drivers seperately. Look for references to “linux-solo” in the threads. So it could be very possible to write a loader for an alternate graphics architecture. The only real catch would be the kernel stuff, but from the looks the NVIDIA’s kernel wrapper, it wouldn’t be too phenomenally hard to port that. The interface is rather high level and simple. There is also talk of SNAP supporting at least an open source ATI driver based on the DRI one. Of course, this is all still speculative — the drivers situation might not pan out like that. However, it would be a boon for alternate OSs if it did.
If you don’t like the GPL license simply don’t derive or use any code in your own work from GPLd projects. I can’t see how you could possibly have a problem with this.
So cut and dried, is it now Jack? Then why oh why is the list of successful OSS projects NOT using the GPL so long? Can you spell PERL? Or how about Apache? Mozilla? Then how about QT? The ones that _do_ use it tend toward the LGPL. Now why is that I wonder? Might it be there is more to this story than you are making out? Surely not, I would hope, because we’re all OSS brothers, yes? What’s a little Judas kiss between friends, no?