On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2003, Ira Abramov wrote about "Re: need tool for high quality
>typesetting, unicode-capable":
> > http://www.index.co.il/dfus/article_page.asp?info_id=112840
> >...
>
> very interesting links!
>
> > Sadly, the Bible is partly a project of the Hebrew Uni, but I see no
> > publication of theirs on the subject. If there was any justice, all the
> > information from and about the project would have been available to the
> > public, including fonts and sources.
>
> Right, the hiding of information in Israeli universities and other state-
> funded institutions is a real shame. American univerisities produced BSD
> (UC Berkeley), X11 (MIT), Tcl/Tk (UC Berkeley), Kermit (Columbia),
> and tons of other stuff, while Israeli universities produced - what?
>
Actually, the Technion laboratories of the EE faculty (I don't know about
others) mandate the final works of the students to be distributed under an
open-source or similar license. (unless of course they were sponsored by
an industrial source or for the Tecnion's internal use). That was the case
for my projects (the IP-Noise and the Seminars Management ones), at least.
Of course, I don't know how many of these projects are of actual
substantial worth. Some labs give exactly the same project semester after
a semester. If this supervisor concentrated his efforts on producing
something continuos he could have actually produced something
more substantial and usable.
> Andwhen finally some good free software does come out of an Israeli
> university (Mosix), people start to complain about it and the only
> righteous man in Sodom that wrote it, and fork it off.
I agree that the flames about MOSIX not becoming GPL in time were a bit
out of place. After all, there were several intellectual property issues
that had to be resolved before it could have been released to the public.
In any case, the reason openMosix was forked (in part by Israelis) was
because Prof. Amnon Barak does not accept patches to it from the outside.
Thus, while technically free software it does not benefit much from the
open-source software development model. (as examplified in ESR's
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar"). Whether a fork was in place, instead of
other means, is beyond my limited knowledge in this regard.
That said, I believe that software that is developed inside universities
and not released to the public is not a good or advisable thing. It is
possible that it technically legal. In the U.S. there's the issue of the
stanford checker, which was used to find some bugs in the Linux kernel,
but has otherwise not been made available in source or binary forms.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
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"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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