Subject: Which is more common?

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 22:32:57 +0200

Which is has more copies floating around - the bible or the GNU GPL?

You might want to rethink your answer after you run the following command
on your favorite Linux system:
	locate COPYING | wc -l

On one Redhat system I tried there were 309 copies (!), 271 of which were
the regular GPL, 23 were the LGPL, and the rest weird things like one copy
of COPYING.BULGARIAN in the openoffice installation :) Most of these
copies, but not all of them, were in the /usr/share/doc directory.
The command
	du -c `locate COPYING`

turned up that more than 6MB of that disk was filled with useless copies
of that file. 6MB! Once upon a time this was the size of the whole hard
disk :)

The reason I noticed this rediculous proliferation of GPL copies was that
someone once complained to me that in a piece free sotware I had written
I did not include the text of the GPL - I only said "This software is GPL".
I remembered his complaint when I released with Dan Kenigsberg a Hebrew spell
checker a couple of days ago (most of you have probably seen the announcement
on linux-il), and included the COPYING file in that distribution. I then
realised how silly it would be if Redhat included my package, and added yet
another copy of the COPYING file to the system...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Sunday, Dec 15 2002, 11 Tevet 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |AAAAA: the American Association for the
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |Abolition of Abbreviations and Acronyms

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 08:55:41 +0200 (IST)

> on your favorite Linux system:

I ran this command:

locate COPYING | grep '/COPYING$' |
	xargs grep -F "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE" |
	uniq | wc -l

And it gave me 404 documents in return. And:

du -c $(locate COPYING | grep '/COPYING$' |
	xargs grep -F "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE" | uniq | sed 's/:.*$//')

gave me 7992 kilobytes of occupied space.

Nice shell game.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:10:42 +0200 (EET)

> on your favorite Linux system:

If most of those copies are exactly identical (not even different
whitespaces), then it is possible to save disk space by making all
identical copies hard links to one of them (if all of /usr is on a single
partition).

I wonder how much disk space can really be released by this method.
                                             --- Omer
WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html

---

From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Dec 2002 13:44:23 +0200

> another copy of the COPYING file to the system...

hm... I've heard it said that the GPL was viral, but i didn't realize
they meant the "actual" file to be viral :-)

This reminds of the old joke of the new Microsoft compression scheme
that will save everyone using Microsoft Windows half of their disk
space: they are going to shorten their name to MS.

-- 
 Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]> 
 http://benyossef.com 
 "When you walk up to the guard on a train and ask if it is the 
  Swansea train, you do not expect the reply `I don't know, I'm 
  about to phone the driver to find out where we are going'. 
	-- Alan Cox, the diary.