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GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

alexplescan.com

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Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#221

Post by paulmd »

dahart wrote: post #181
memefrog wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in this case Parallel’s notice is not a modification of the license at all This is a question of law that only a court can answer.

That’s not true. The language of Parallel’s citation notice, while confusing to some users, does not impose any legal requirements and is not part of the license. Neither the notice nor the license claim otherwise. RMS, and more importantly, Ole Tange, agree that Parallel’s notice is not legally binding, and intended to write it that way, and there is a publicly visible history of this intention and agreement.

I don't think anyone would make a deal with oracle on a "don't worry this isn't legally binding, you're just stating your intent to comply" basis.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#222

Post by mistrial9 »

chasil wrote: post #171
BoppreH wrote: post #107

It's a nice tool, but it also shows the shortcomings of shell commands. In a proper programming language, we'd have something like parallel [1..5], i => { sleep random()*10+5; possibly_flaky i } // [{"Seq": 4, "Host": ":", "Starttime": 1692491267... And `parallel` would only have to worry about parallelization. Instead, the shell environment forces programs to invent their own parameter separator (:::), a templating…

GNU Parallel is also based on perl, so the footprint is quite large. GNU xargs implements limited parallelization, and is compiled C. This functionality is present within busybox, including the Windows version. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/parallel-shells-xargs-u... GNU Parallel will have much greater functionality, but it will not reach as far as xargs.

meanwhile, python DASK is very well funded to be cloud-native, and also local.. however it relies on a python runtime, so you know .. also not sure about the DASK license terms

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#223

Post by thomasahle »

gorjusborg wrote: post #132
thomasahle wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research. Thia is true, but it also makes it very hard for academics and PhD students who mainly write software over papers. They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia. If we had a better practice of citing central software we use - at least the academic software that wants to be cited - we could have a more flourishing ecosystem of su…

> They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia. You're welcome? Seriously though, adding the citation nag to software is two wrongs not making a right. As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution. If they can't figure it out, finding a greener pasture makes a lot of sense.

> As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution.

If you're not writing papers, the citation notification isn't for you. Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#224

Post by paulmd »

capableweb wrote: post #63
badsectoracula wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where you get the "or pay 10000€" part from? Most likely from the manpage: If you use --will-cite in scripts to be run by others you are making it harder for others to see the citation notice. The development of GNU parallel is indirectly financed through citations, so if your users do not know they should cite then you are making it harder to finance development. However, if you pay 10000 EUR, you have done your p…

Again, it's not part of the license nor are you forced to select between "cite GNU parallels or pay 10000 EUR". You're free to use it however you want since the software is GPL, including ignoring any of the output from using the tool if you so chose to.

> including ignoring any of the output from using the tool if you so chose to.

the user isn't merely ignoring the output though, they are actively interacting with the program in a way that the program is presenting as accepting of the agreement being presented to the user.

the agreement is plainly presented in a way that implies that it's an obligation, like any other clickwrap agreement. and everyone except ole and stallman seems to agree that it's self-evidently apparent that it's a clickwrap agreement restricting the freedoms of the user.

"free software that only prints a message and exits unless you agree to a clickwrap with further licensing terms" is not a road that FSF should go down. And it's only because of the GPL severability clause that it's not a crisis, everyone knows it's a farce, except for a bunch of the users, who are affirmatively taking action to indicate consent with an additional licensing agreement.

it's not facially clear that in most jurisdictions that the clickwrap agreement is null and void merely because the software is free. you can end up paying for lots of free stuff in life if you're not careful. you agreed to the agreement, it's on you.

you are of course free to remove the prompt and use the software yourself, and ole rants and raves about that on his website. but, agreeing to the license is a separate thing from the GPL license, most likely. just like paying for credit monitoring is different from getting your free credit reports or freezes - they'll try and railroad you into paying, definitely! and just because it's supposed to be free, doesn't mean you're not getting charged if you agree to it!

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#225

Post by electroly »

dehrmann wrote: post #197
electroly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably, GNU Parallel did not relicense; it's still GPL. The author wants to have his cake (gain the popularity benefits of being a GPL-licensed GNU tool, be able to carpetbomb Stack Overflow with "use GNU Parallel" answers, etc.) and eat it too (get people to cite or pay him as a condition of using the product). Since this isn't possible (GPL doesn't allow additional restrictions), but the author still really wants…

So if it's GPL, I can remove the citation bits, release it under the GPL as free-parallel, and everything's OK?

Yes. The GPL explicitly says this about "further restrictions":

> If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

However, this doesn't really even come into play because the citation request is not a restriction on the license. It's not anything. As far as the GPL is concerned, it's just some code, and the GPL grants you the right to redistribute modified copies.

And by renaming it to "free-parallel" you have respected the author's trademark. You can absolutely do this, at the cost of the author being upset at you. They might get upset that "free-parallel" is too close to their "GNU Parallel" trademark but I (IANAL) don't think they'd be legally right about that. GNU Parallel coexists with other software called "parallel".

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#226

Post by daveguy »

throwaway277432 wrote: post #33

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers. These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need…

Rush is an alternative to gnu parallel that is MIT licensed:

https://GitHub.com/shenwei356/rush

As you mention xargs has parallel capabilities and gargs is Apache licensed software that fixes some of xargs shortcomings:

https://GitHub.com/brentp/gargs

No reason to use gnu parallel.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#227

Post by Matl »

akerl_ wrote: post #78
Matl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And calling that GPL? You can add any message you want into your GPL program. Also, a GPL program does not have to be free. This has nothing to do with the GPL. You can say in your program that 'by using this software you agree that you're a a cat' and license it under the GPL. That does not mean the GPL relates to cats in any way.

Can you back that up? If I put the GPL in my software and add a file next to it that says "Also you can't use this software if you make more than $100k/year", I've pretty clearly added an additional clause that's incompatible with the GPL.

It basically means that clause doesn't do anything. If it is phrased as a request, rather than a requirement then it doesn't violate anything for sure.

The author of Notepad++ for example is famous for adding all kinds of statements associated with the software and in no way is that part of the license.

On the other hand, if your license.txt states to i.e. not use the software for evil aka JSON famously did then yes, it is part of the license.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#228

Post by NelsonMinar »

green-orca wrote: post #34

I'm using task spooler a lot for parallel background processing. What I like the most it the ability to add further tasks to the queue after processing has already started. https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/tsp.1.html

Wow this tool is fantastic, thank you! The UI is very nice and simple. How has this not existed in Unix for 30+ years?

https://github.com/justanhduc/task-spooler

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#229

Post by [deleted] »

codetrotter wrote: post #93
gjvc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from that man page, there is a name clash with "ts" from moreutils

I installed task-spooler just now, because I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time. It looks like the actual name of the task-spooler command on Debian after install is “tsp”, not “ts”. So no collision :) Now it just remains to be seen if the package by default allows the tasks to continue to run after I log out, or if systemd will annoyingly kill the tasks after I disconnect from ssh the same way syste…

[deleted]

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#230

Post by tesseract »

lysium wrote: post #147
coliveira wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you mention is the main reason why shell script is not a decent language to write long programs. It is full of inconsistencies, and since it depends on other commands, you have to learn the quirks of each command you use. Moreover, good luck if you need to debug this. Shell should only be used for small scripts that are easy to debug.

Do you recommend any good alternative when your shell program gets too large? Honest question, as I’m struggling to leave the shell environment once the program gets too large. I could use Perl, but $? and the likes get quickly out of hand. Python’s support for pipes was difficult last time I used it, but that may have changed. What would you recommend?

Good ergonomics for Perl-style quick and dirty text processing were part of the original design goals for Ruby. Those parts of the language are still there. You can write code that feels more concise than Python yet, IMO, tends to be more readable/maintainable than Perl can stereotypically be. Modern style guides, however, de-emphasize that style of Ruby since it might not be the most appropriate in the context of say a large Rails project.
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