Do people understand free licenses? Most importantly, do they understand the difference between the GPL, the Apache License, the BSD license? I don’t think so.

Why am I saying this?

You might be aware that I recently introduced an “Internal Usage” commercial license for ScrewTurn Wiki. It started as an experiment to see how many people would ask to purchase such license because their business isn’t compatible with the GPL. It turns out that there is roughly one request per week.

I’m generally a honest and fair person, so every time a user asks to purchase such a license, I invariably force them to notice that they can use and even modify the public packages for free, without any type of small print involved. I wouldn’t feel right selling them something that others get for free.

I’ve been surprised to know that quite a few managers or business owners in the software development field don’t even understand what the GPL is and what does it grants you to do. They’re ready to waste 100 Euros for getting even less than what is publicly available (commercial packages don’t include translations for example). It’s not much money, I know that, but what if it was 500€? or more? What if you’re doing the same mistake for many other applications, or even worse the mistake of not using a useful and perfectly suitable application because you’re afraid of its free license?

Guys, please, please spend a couple of hours studying the different free software licenses that the industry has agreed upon in the last several years. It’s very important for your business and, given the trends of the industry, you’ll probably have to deal with free software even more in the upcoming months and years.

I’m a big fan of Sun VirtualBox. It works very well, it’s fast and it’s free.

However, it has some drawbacks, for example the impossibility to open/import/mount an existing virtual machine in the GUI.

The powerful command-line interface (vboxmanage.exe) comes into help in this case. The registervm is the command I needed, however it refuses to register a virtual machine that references a hard disk so a little hack is needed. The steps I needed to do follow:

1. Open VirtualBox GUI and register the hard disk using the menu option File | Virtual Media Manager, close the GUI
2. Open the VM definition file (.xml) with a text editor
3. Find the StorageControllers section, which should be similar to this:

   <StorageControllers>

     <StorageController name="IDE" type="PIIX4" PortCount="2">

       <AttachedDevice type="HardDisk" port="0" device="0">

         <Image uuid="{c5df8222-2969-4b63-add0-bb172ed2ae85}"/>

       </AttachedDevice>

     </StorageController>

   </StorageControllers>

4. Cut (CTRL+X) the AttachedDevice element, leaving StorageController empty, save the file
5. Run the following command:

   vboxmanage registervm "full path to the VM file.xml"

6. Paste back the cut text in the VM definition file, save the file and close the editor
7. Open the GUI, you’re done

I have no idea whether this procedure is safe, but it worked for all my 6 virtual machines.

So, a couple of days ago I installed the Spam Karma 2 plugin for WordPress on this blog.

It’s simply perfect. In just two days it nuked more than 200 spam comments. Not a single false positive, nor a false negative.

Now I can relax. No more comments to manually delete, no more worries, no more unpleasant feelings when opening Outlook…

P.S.: it would be nice if there was something similar for phpBB, so I could clean our forums.

Today, the last day of 2006, we reached 666 posts in our forums.