GNU General Public License(GPL) vs Berkley Software Distribution Licenses(BSD) and the views of the Free Software Foundation on each.

I would like to take a minute to explain the differences between the GNU General Public License and The Berkeley Software Distribution License.

Where did they originate?
GNU(GNU is Not Unix) was a project in the 80s/ very early 90s to create a completely free body of software to get along without any software not free. GNU had planned to make an complete Unix compatible operating system with free software and was finally finished when the Linux kernel was developed but it never truly caught on but many people still maintain Linux Operating systems based on GNU should be considered GNU/Linux. GNU General Public License was written for the Project by none other than Richard Stallman.

He lists four freedoms essential to software development: freedom to run a program for any purpose, freedom to study the mechanics of the program and modify it, freedom to redistribute copies, and freedom to improve and change modified versions for public use.To implement these freedoms, users needed full access to code. To ensure code remained free and provide it to the public, Stallman created the General Public License (GPL), which allowed software and the future generations of code derived from it to remain free for public use. Some complications arose, however, when certain software was grandfathered in the law of GPL because of code it derived from.

so the main purpose of the GPL is to guarantee software is free and will always be open.

Now lets look at the BSD License. The BSD License was born of the BSD operating system, a Unix like operating system, written at U.C. Berkeley. BSD was originally Proprietary and the license maintains that to this day. The main difference between the GPL and the BSD is that with the BSD you can turn it into proprietary software and you dont have to give any of the code away if you like. where as the GPL says you must make any programs derived from this program completely open. there are other GNU licences like the LGPL that let you get around that but you must describe your modifications when using the LGPL. both LGPL and GPL are considered open source licenses but BSD is not because of the advertising Clause. It does not matter if you use both the LGPL and the original BSD license if you use the original BSD license the software cannot be considered open source in the eyes of the Free Software Foundation because people who develop software based on yours cannot compare or contrast their software to yours publicly legally.

The GPL license is strongly reccomended for all open source products if it fits the software, The original BSD license is not reccomended due to its permissiveness, and the LGPL is considered acceptable to Stamp on Open source software. The free software Foundation Urges all Copyrights to be released and only Trademarks are considered to be acceptable to protect for open source software  making the software Copyleft. Although it allows trademarks to be protected, it does not condone this practice. it urges developers to go completely copyleft and allow all code to be unprotected. It does not like the LGPL or the MPL or some BSD licenses(non-original) but allows those to be considered Open Source. It very strongly discourages any code to be protected by copyright(but allows trademarks) and if this is the case the software cannot be considered open. It claims this is bad for the development of open source software and in many peoples eyes it is.
the FSF will Prosecute for any GPL infringement(and will win). this is why many companies do not include this license in their product but some of the notable non-infringers are Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Open Office, Linux Operating Systems, GNU, and many others.

The Free software foundation also does not like the original BSD License to be coupled with other Open Source Licenses.
The Free software foundation also doesnt prefer free software to be referred to as Freeware. They see that as a dirty word and really it is. Freeware is by definition Software that is free that is fully functional for an unlimited time or Partially functional for an unlimited time with a Fully functional program available commercially. (Huge examples of the dirty kind of freeware are Google Earth, Google Sketchup, and many early games.) It does not like truly Free software to be called freeware whether it is open or not.
In any license the Free software foundation likes language to be clear to the point where nothing can be construed into something else. It strongly discourages the use of the word services when referring to any piece of software. (Google you did it again!)(the web is not yours google do something standard for once)
High quality free software, particularly open source software is considered the best, most useful software because it allows the rapid development of Software with no cost to the end user.

Firefox 4 Release candidate (beta) released

This is live from the official beta version of Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate now available for download. If youve never tried firefox 4 beta 11 or 12,  you definitely should try this one. Download Firefox 4.0 Release candidate 1

Mozilla Firefox Addon manager.

Rocking my Firefox is still easy at the moment with the help of the Compatibility reporter
(Mozilla's add-on tester which lets you install any .XPI you want), most of my extensions still work and Greasemonkey is running super smooth. Even the ChaCha guide toolbar still works. there's only one extension I really care about that's not working right now and that's Wikilook. Wikilook pulls up the Wikipedia article of a word or link i select or hover over inside a little bubble so i don't have to go to the Page to view the first part of the article (cause that's what i usually want). everything else seems to be working great although i had to make minor modifications to the UI in order to make it the way it should be. I had to bring the panorama button back into the tabbar. and i had to closes the Addon bar which took me about 10 seconds total to see and correct both of them. Addons that slowed me down before, hardly even make a difference anymore. Yoono, Stumbleupon, and other performance gluttons run excellent under Firefox 4. there is almost no difference in Performance and a one second increase in startup time with them enabled. (compare to the 10 second increase in startup for 3.6.15 and major performance issues with some of them enabled.)

Its running epically smooth there is no more printing error and most of my addons still work.
including Fire gestures, Every persona ever, Flagfox, Fastestfox, Stumbleupon, Yoono, ChaCha Guide toolbar, the precious greasemonkey, Screengrab, AdBlock Plus, and Xmarks.

FFixer Picture viewer.

Greasemonkey is working like a charm and I didn't have to reinstall it for 4.0 compatibility which means all my user scripts from my wikipedia like button to my FFixer Facebook fixer and Better Facebook are still working smoothly like always.

Firefox Tab management: note the arrows for scrolling and the expand and panorama buttons.

when i have too many tabs open my app tabs dont hide themselves like in opera unlike in google chrome and my Apptabs are always visible in any of what i like to call "Firefox's Virtual windows". and if you dont want them showing you can use true windows also. and unlike google chrome i can use tab groups (firefox's virtual windows)  to manage how many tabs are on screen. also unlike google chrome When there is an excess of tabs on the screen I dont have to just look at the Favicon of each tab(it will show some text and the favicon) it will scroll the tabs if you would like. or if you dont want to scroll through just use the expand arrow next to the + button and it will show you all of your tabs in a nice Windows classic like list. No other browser has all of these tab management options and for the moment none of them will for at least a few months (if opera does it) or 5 if Chrome does it as it is not in the 3 months away from stable dev release yet. so as of now Firefox is leading tab management with Opera in second.  and chrome or IE in third.

If no more major bugs are discovered that take some time to fix Firefox will pass the QA tests (quality assurance) and will be released around the middle of march and major development will finally start on the fast tracked Future of Firefox.

Born of Prism, the potential Site specific window

site specific Twitter menu

Firefox 5, due by june, promises if they are ready site specific browsing(http://areweprettyyet.com/5/desktopApps/#),  a new addon updater,  windows 64 bit support(which was pushed to 5 because it wasnt ready), performance improvements, and  and most importantly a more beautiful refined user interface. Firefox 4 will usher in a Format for release where firefox releases 4 times a year.  this would mean Firefox should be in Version 7 by year end.

Firefox menu in Site Specific window

Firefox has never experienced a fast track release program like Chrome has so it will be interesting if they can deliver on this promise of  doubling the number of releases by mid 2012. but it seems likely that it is not impossible because of the small number of Changes per release instead of hundreds it looks like they are aiming for dozens. If Small scale/Short term beta's(like chrome's beta program) are used instead of the massive long term million people beta that 4 has used. now that we have switched to the short term beta program model, it should be easy to get these features tested and running.

Firefox 5 is out of the concept stage and is moving into the development stage so we should see it go into Developer/beta testing soon. possibly by months end.

this development cycle change is great. it should allow the most capable browser out on the market today to continue to evolve and stay modern(and hopefully continue to bring IE down. i want IE to be down to 25% browser usage). It may not be the most feature rich browser out of the box but it certainly can do almost anything you can imagine and today it's the most efficient at adding these features with its great new way of incorporating extentions.

oh and google keep on paying for the firefox development please it couldn't be possible without your "search royalties" to the mozilla foundation. which funds everything from the development of new technologies through mozilla labs to the development of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey.

Finally after years of trying to remove it i stumble onto the fix by looking in a place most people never see let alone just look at for no reason...

heres a repost of something when i still didnt remember this existed with minor modifications of course

oh my gosh it was that simple? all along i only had to do that...
today is a good day... I Finally Fixed the "mywebsearch" problem that has been plaguing us for Years.
We uninstalled my web search removed all of its files and it still didn't go away... but today after just looking around firefox's configuration(not recommended for people who don't have a clue what they're doing) i found a simple name for a setting that kinda sounded like the problem. it had "keyword" in the name(and i thought back to AOL and keyword was a word that you type into the address bar that sent you to a website and then i thought maybe this could fix the problem we have with mywebsearch searching "google" if you type it in.)       and my suspicions were heightened even more when I saw mywebsearch in the string attached to the setting. so being the experimental type that i am i thought what if i type into that string a google search address up to the point where the search terms are...

and lo and behold it worked! now when I type "facebook" into the awesome bar it searches Facebook on google not my web search.

Surprising Memory Use of Browsers

Hmmm... Really I didnt know Firefox was that efficient with its memory.

Obviously by this picture which shows the memory use of each browser, Firefox is the clear winner for Total memory use. Opera is a close second with chrome far behind both of those and Safari WAY IN THE BACK. (you will notice there is no IE... that is because I only have IE6 on this computer [we abandoned it and never looked back])(based off of newly opened Facebook, Gmail, Youtube, and Wikipedia articles: HDMI, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio tabs)(no extentions)
Firefox 4.0B12 -                   310704KB
Opera 11.01.1190 -             329976KB
Chrome 11.0.686.3 -            449647KB
Safari 5 (7533.16) -              957224KB     Who was the wise guy behind that

in the raw data it shows Firefox uses 3 times less memory than Safari.

  Ooh lets look at the disk space it uses
according to windows(because I'm lazy)(estimates the program folders size)
Opera 11.01: 28.17 MB(the smallest-as advertised)
Firefox 4B12(much larger than other betas): 31.38 MB(possibly as much as 55 MB with history and addons)
Safari 5: 41.15 MB
Google Chrome Dev 11.0.686.3 : 161.00 MB(as always from the beginning the largest)

as for the other stats its hard to measure the CPU Tax of each browser and as for speed It depends on what you are testing...

but as for Resource management it looks like Firefox, opera, and chrome are excellent at it. and each of those browsers have their strength.
Chrome looks like it might be the fastest and its fairly extensible because of how many there are at the moment but lacks in extensibility because its extentions cannot have some capabilities available with extentions in other browsers.

Firefox is decent with its speed, great with resources and SUPER EXTENSIBLE having the biggest collection of addons with add-ons that are not possible on most browsers(i speaks the truth), and though its definitely not the fastest, it's not slow.

Opera is definitely the smallest, its speed is undeniable, its javascript engine is rocking, and it has amazing features built in, but it lacks in available extensions(at the moment).

and Safari is well... Slow. Really Slow. By far the slowest out of the 5 major browsers. it has a unique UI but basically no extentions and is a big memory hog. the only thing it has going for it is its preinstalled on Apple Products which im sure as the population becomes more Tech savvy that will continue to matter less and less.

All new browsers have converged on the same basic UI and great security(except for safari) so those are not even issues.

so really it's a matter of preference of do you like Extensibility, Speed, Features, or a combination of those.