Archive for: November, 2009

The General Pirate License

Nov 15 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under General

I have come across many situations where I wanted to share an idea but never wanted the idea to be attributed to me, mainly because the original idea never came from me and also because I did not know who the original idea came from.

There are some other instances where I want to share some source code which is almost working, but may contain bugs and untested edge conditions that can produce undocumented results (if at all there is any documentation). I want people to use the source code for solving their problems, but in most of the cases they may have to modify the code to fit their particular problem. I don’t want to take the blame if anything goes wrong, and I don’t ever want to support the source code, other than in the cases where I really want to.

I hereby propose a new license to help you in cases like these to promote sharing of your content in the best possible way – by allowing others to pirate it. This license should be used if you want your ideas or work to be shared and modified freely, but you don’t want to maintain or support the original ideas unless you really wish to do so.

(Edited to remove unwanted clauses. Thanks Scott)

The General Pirate license (GPiL)

1. This work may be copied as many times as you wish, modified in any way you want and published in any medium you like, provided you adhere to all the seven rules in this license.

2. You will not attribute the modified version of the work/product to the original author.

3. Once you modify the work, you should clearly mention the work as yours and you will be responsible for supporting and maintaining the work (if required).

4. You will not disclose the identity of the original author (i.e. your source) without the written permission from that person.

5. You will publish your modified version of this work under this same license (i.e. the General Pirate License).

6. All uses of this work will be at your own risk. The original author is liable to give you support for this work unless (a) You modified any part of this work/product (b) They do not wish to do so.

7. The source where you obtained this work from may or may not be the real original author of this work, but that is not the point here. The real point is the work itself, not the author.

There is a reason why all works under GPiL (General Pirate License) should continue to be under GPiL (clause 5). Any project under GPiL is supposed to be free to be modified and copied at will. According to the above rules, it is perfectly legal even to sell any intellectual property guarded by the GPiL. In essence GPiL allows you to do whatever you want with the IP – copy, modify, share, sell etc. The only restrictions that apply are the seven rules of GPiL. Clause 5 ensures that even if somebody is making profit from an IP, they have to share their version under GPiL. This is how the basic spirit of GPiL is carried forward.

That’s all. Let me know if any amendments can be made to this license to make it more piratical.

Now spread the word mate, and get sailin’. Arrrr!

9 responses so far

Geocities won’t be missed

Nov 11 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under General

Yahoo!’s shutting down of geocities made news for the past couple of months. Even thought the sweet memories of starting our very first pages in geocities will be lurking around for a long time, I think we are not going to miss geocities much. Yahoo! may have their own reasons# to close geocities, but I think all in all it was good that geocities got shut down.

If you think about it, geocities did not matter any more.

Yahoo!_Geocities

The traffic to geocities was declining very rapidly in the last few years. Very rarely did the old geocities pages get featured in the search engine results. I don’t remember getting a geocities page as a result for any of my google searches (May be my queries are too much specialized and are biased).

I would argue that geocites did not have much quality content. Most of the pages in geocities were personal pages which were “under construction” for eternity. Newer users never signed up for geocities. Social networking was in and creating personal pages was out and users flocked to Facebook and the like. If anyone wanted to create pages so badly, they usually started a blog in Blogger or WordPress. After Yahoo!’s announcement of a probable closure of geocities, much of the quality data was moved by the users to other sites. All this meant that the pages in geocities no longer mattered. It was just the junk of the internet that ought to be cleaned out.

The biggest impact the closure of geocities will have on the web is on the search engine results. Even though the pages from geocities were not prominently featured in the search results, they always polluted the long tail results. (38 million pages do carry a very long tail with it). Most biggies in the search engine business have removed geocities from their index. There is another big aftereffect to this. The search engine rankings of other websites will be affected. You see, this 38 million web pages of geocities had lots and lots of outbound links. Remember that these links are old  and do carry significant weight. If these links are removed from the PageRank calculations, the search results will not be the same. I hope that the search results will improve at least a  little bit.

By the way if you were sleeping for the past few months and missed the party, and if you really want to get some of your pages back from geocities, you can try to get the data back from the Reocities project or from the Internet Archive.

#Every reason is economic. Isn’t it?

2 responses so far

Why do we Startup?

Nov 08 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under Startup

Did you know that 9 out of 10 startups fail?  We are talking about the serious startups. In the not-so-serious type, almost all of them fail. So still why do I want to start a startup?

In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter whether I succeed or not. What matters is that 1 out of 10 startups do succeed. Here we mean success in the changing-life-of-others-for-good sense, not in the absolute economic sense. When you stand for a vision as ambitious as changing the life of others, you want to maximize the chances of humanity getting better and changing for good.

We cannot improve the ratio of startups succeeding. It will always be 1:10. So how do we increase the number of successful startups? By increasing the number of startups.

After a few years we will not be here in this world, but the changes we bring and the ideas we spread will remain. We have the responsibility to become the enablers of a newer and better world. I believe startups are perfect pathways to a better future.

6 responses so far

Recursion & bad examples

Nov 07 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under Programming

If you ask a typical computer science graduate from Kerala to write a program to print the nth Fibonacci number, most of them* will invariably give you the following function:

int fibonacci (int n){
    if(n<2){
        return n;
    }else{
        return fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2);
    }
}

So far so good, except that the answer is wrong.

Recursion is the worst way to find a Fibonacci number. The last time I checked it was impossible to use recursion to compute even the 50th Fibonacci number in a personal computer!

If it is impossible to calculate even the 50th Fibonacci number using this function, how could you possibly teach something like this in a computer science course? The only way Fibonacci numbers should be calculated is by linearly adding the numbers in a loop or by using any direct formula you have. Of course for some applications you can speed up recursion by remembering the child nodes in the tree and thereby avoiding doing the same calculations again in some other branch.

The scariest part is yet to come. In many colleges they use finding the nth Fibonacci number as the primary example for teaching recursion!

Why not teach students the best possible way to find the nth Fibonacci number? Why not teach a real world example for recursion? Is it necessary to teach the concepts in computer science using lousy examples?

*Take blanket statements with a grain of salt.

7 responses so far

Fine-tuning the StackOverflow theme

Nov 04 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under Design

Being a regular user of StackOverflow, I was constantly being haunted by some of the small design issues in the website. Look at the screenshot below (click to enlarge):

stackoverflow-old

I have this problem that I get really confused when visiting websites with a lot of stuff. Even though I have been to StackOverflow a zillion times, I still get distracted by the colors used in the website. (Of course these things are really subjective). I downloaded the style sheet and edited it. Here is how the site looks now (for me):

stackoverflow-new

Here are some of the changes:

  • Removed the background colors for the statistics (view count, points etc)
  • Reduced the font size of the stats thereby making them less noticeable.
  • Round cornered some tabs, tags etc.
  • Removed the points displayed near the users name. This is not very useful and removing it cleaned up lot of clutter.

I am thinking of making some more modifications including stacking up the stats one over the other and making the tags for each question less intrusive. We can do away with a lot of stats in the page since most of the users are not very much interested in those minute details.

You can download the Greasemonkey script for this theme here.

8 responses so far