Nuts and Volts - February 2011

www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/article/february2011_SmileysWorkshop

Another big difference is cost. This is both a blessing and a curse. The marginal cost of reproduction on the Internet is near enough to zero that it can be neglected. This magazine you are holding in your sweaty hands costs money to print, but if you get the article in an electronic format it doesn’t cost the publisher as much to send it to you. Here’s the downside: Since putting information on the Internet is so cheap that any idiot can afford to do it, many idiots do it. How do you know that something you found with Google is accurate? You don’t really.

At least with a paper magazine or book there is cost involved so somebody might have spent some time vetting the material. That doesn’t mean dead tree resources are always correct, however. I’ve made my share of paper and ink blunders, but some of the crap I’ve seen on the Internet makes me wonder if the stuff wasn’t posted intentionally to mislead. Which brings us to the worst aspect of the Internet: trolls. (Don’t get me started.)

Even with the lack of reliable filters, the Internet is still the best information sharing tool ever invented. So, I’m going to share some of the stuff I’ve been writing about by putting it in an open source project: avrtoolbox on Google Code. I put the above section on AVRfreaks for comments and, oh yes, I got some ( http://tinyurl.com/ 393y8fc). If you aren’t familiar with tinyurl.com, it’s a free service that provides an alias for long URLs like the ones usually generated by forum posts.

Open Source Licenses Are A Sign Of Mental Illness

Open source means free, doesn’t it? Maybe, but I’ve been baffled by all the guff I’ve read about software licenses. What does “free” mean anyway? I believe nobody reads the lawyer BS, so this is what I used to put at the head of all my code: If you use this software, it will destroy whatever machine you use it on and kill anyone in a one kilometer radius. So, don’t even consider using it for any reason whatsoever! Have a nice day.

I thought that by not having a license, the code was free to use, and that by joking about destruction no sane person would think to sue me if the code wasn’t perfect. Then, someone informed me that by not having a license on my source code I was actually copyrighting my code and other folks couldn’t legally use it. Apparently, the restrictive copyright comes with the creation, so you have to explicitly reject the standard copyright and use a license to let other folks use your materials. So, I read a bit about licenses and found some of the most esoteric philosobabble discussions by people who truly have too much time on their hands. After hours of reading about what ‘free’ really means, I decided these guys are freaking