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I think Kappos having been brought up in IBM will make him more open to (or at least less skeptical of) open source-type ideas than any of the other former directors, and his computer/engineering background will also make him more critical of our patent system, and not as focused on ratcheting protections up as far as they can go.

I don't know what being "more open to open source-type ideas" means. Nor would I use the term "IP" as you did. Software patents hurt all developers except those at IBM because IBM holds the most patents. Holding the most patents means IBM can cross-license far more easily than any other patent holder. In fact, we know how valuable cross-licensing is to IBM because IBM has told us. IBM has told us cross-licensing outweighs the value of collecting patent license fees by an order of magnitude. IBM got ten times the value of using patents held by others than licensing its own patents. This means IBM alone can skirt the trouble the patent system causes everyone else. IBM can completely undo the alleged advantage the patent system is supposed to give smaller organizations trying to commercially launch their work. You really should read Richard Stallman's examination of the US patent system as it applies to software development for a fuller description of the details on how IBM's statement in 1990 reveals the harm done to all software developers under the USPTO's thumb.

The solution is to completely deny anyone software patents so software developers can go back to relying on trademark and copyright law which is sufficient to avoid defrauding consumers and enforcing licenses, respectively. But I doubt the world's largest patent holder is in favor of disempowerment, and now that they have a man running the USPTO I doubt we'll see that office seeking to make software algorithms unpatentable.

I think what we're seeing here is just another instance of how corporate-friendly President Obama is. The more I read self-identified "open source" adherents saying how good this move is, the more I think that the open source movement is too corporate-friendly as well. Mere affiliation with a movement that isn't fighting for software freedom isn't doing you any favors; raise your critical standards and keep on fighting for the end of software patents.

Perhaps stop buying music from artists who sign with RIAA labels, but I see no reason to stop buying music from labels who treat artists and listeners fairly and reasonably. Quite to the contrary, those are the artists and businesses we should reward for showing that we can still enjoy commercial recorded music and help the artists we like without being called "pirates" or denying ourselves the fun of sharing stuff we like.

I don't like to repeat so much of what I recently posted, but a lot of these details are apropos in this thread as well. Magnatune is one music vendor offers a compelling deal to artists and listeners—you can get the music in multiple pre-encoded forms and/or on a physical CD (your choice), you can pay on a sliding scale (minimum of $5/disc, I believe), there are subscriptions for download and streaming available where you pay regularly or pay a large lump sum and get downloads forever (I did this), you can listen to their entire catalog online via Flash or via music players in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, and all of the freely available tracks are licensed to share. Customers are told they can share a few tracks with others as well.

Artists get a good deal too which includes 50% of the take per track, licensing to Magnatune means artists keep their copyrights and enter non-exclusive deals with Magnatune instead of turning over control to a label and going into the label's debt only to get out at the label's permission ("That track isn't up to your standards! Record another track for us."),

Of course Magnatune doesn't accept everything that comes their way. There's no guarantee you'll be able to distribute through any label. But that's to be expected; part of the value of a label is their (metaphorical) discriminatory ear. I buy from Magnatune because I don't want to preview everything, I want them to filter out a bunch of junk for me. I might not share Magnatune's definition of "junk" but that's to be expected too; beauty is subjective. If you, the artist, want guaranteed distribution you should try another venue that doesn't discriminate and take the trade-off of being the gem in the pile of junk waiting for others to discover you.

Maybe Green Dam contains copied without authorization -- I don't know.

But referring to copied code as "piracy" or "stolen" is propaganda, just as bad as the Chinese government's propaganda. The term "intellectual property" makes the article a vague and confused as the term itself -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.

Whenever someone uses that term, you can't tell what in the world he might be talking about (unless you are an expert and can figure it out from other knowledge).

Let's see, three things:

1. It looks like the latest version of Emacs is more than 3 times the size of this latest Opera snapshot, web server and everything! So, you know, Emacs is still worth complaining about. (I know, source code vs. compiled binary isn't fair, but I was just making a joke, and Emacs is still fat.)

2. Opera has always been a web suite, for longer than Firefox has even existed, and it's always come with an insane number of features out of the box, and yet it's also always been fast and nimble and light on memory. I think if anyone can keep these new features from acting as a ball and chain on your computer, Opera can.

3. Um... I forget number three. But you're supposed to do things in threes, so here you go.

If you consider OpenGL and XML parser bindings "advancements", then Java technology is really starting very low.

As two examples, but I'm sure you can head over to JCP and see everything that they have done. But I'm guessing you won't.

Who cares what reasons Sun gave? The result is the same: Java is not an open standard.

Your idea of "open" misses the idea of "open." However, I'll just fault whoever it was that taught you what "open" means, since you do no research yourself.

Go search on Google Patents; they are say enough to find.

See last point given.

...specifically available for "OpenJDK" under the GPL. However, everybody else has to license their patents.

Please head over to here and read. I know that may be quite a task for you.

Sun/Oracle is a big software bully, too.

And who is it again that was found to be an abusive monopoly? I'll let you research that one too.

Yes. They are also brand names.

Any other small facet of their names that has no meaning on the conversation you'd like to bring up as well?

Sun Java and OpenJDK are largely the same codebase and share most of their APIs.

Please read what the difference between ABI and API are. Thank you.

All there is is Sun Java and its derivatives.

Call me a troll and mod me down like a motherfucker, but I'll have to call it like I see it and call you an idiot or you really like to pull people's legs.

If anybody can point to an actual patent that Mono or Tomboy violate, please file an issue report against the Mono project;

I know it is a bit old but, we'll file one once they publish which part they're going to patent, of course, that shouldn't be long. PS: The only complaint I have of .NET is the syntax of LINQ, but what'cha going do?

Besides, anyone thinking that MS would attacking Linux using patents isn't giving Microsoft any credit. I figure that they would try to kill Linux (GNOME proper, since GNOME != Linux) via contracts with Linux vendors as opposed to patents. It just seems too obvious to go that (patents) route. Linux isn't the problem with MS, it is more like the vendors pandering Linux that is.

Also I develop on OpenJDK, I was wondering if you could provide a list of patents that the OpenJDK is infringing on? I'm sure we could work out what it is that you feel is something we may have overlooked.

Mono is way ahead of languages like Java in that regard because, unlike Java, Mono is based on an open standard

Could you clear that up? I'm not sure I follow what you are talking about. Is it because .NET is a standard through an organized body? Whereas, Java is basically a community process with Sun at the head of the community? If this is your beef with Java then what exactly is different between how Java is made versus something like, Linux or GNU HURD?

Besides, what is all this seemingly bad blood between .NET and Java? I've been to many PDCs and the people behind .NET seem pretty accepting of Java much like the Samba - Microsoft love (which granted isn't awesome but it is still pretty good). Also, the Mono devs are pretty cool people on IRC. Really? Do we need to build walls?

The free software movement's goal is freedom for computer users. Some, especially corporations, advocate a different viewpoint, known as "open source," which cites only practical goals such as making software powerful and reliable, focuses on development models, and avoids discussion of ethics and freedom. These two viewpoints are different at the deepest level. For more explanation, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.

Finally I think that you are one of free as in beer .. and free as in free code guys :P

> I thought we were for copyright reform here... i.e. a return to reasonable copyright periods. When did we decide that we wanted to completely abolish copyright? What about the GNU copyrights? Do we start ignoring them too?

Well, there are a few different sets of people here. I, personally, lean towards abolition, though I'm open to exploring reasonable compromises, alternative models, and other ways to compensate authors. (Who doesn't want to see authors compensated?) I'm just not open to jackbooted private internet police (e.g. MediaSentry, RIAA lawyers, DMCA abuse, copyright czars, etc.)

Anyhow, for the specific case of GNU copyrights, I suggest reading the GNU philosophy section, specifically this essay, where they discuss how the GPL could work in a copyright-free world. Basically, we'd adapt, because we're a collection of people who believe in working together. Most of the contributions to GPL'd software don't come from people who are forced to contribute because of the license. And even if people stopped sharing private forks of GPL'd software, those of us who believe in working together would still be able to make a better product and we'd still have our own code.

I know this is a fairly common question, so feel free to copy anything from here to answer it in the future.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

I really just meant from Fortran 90 like the previous poster. 95 is really pretty minor in changes. 2003, yeah, big changes. How many systems are likely to have 2003 on them? I can usually find a Fortran 90 compiler freely available for lots of platforms, and lots of the companies I know that use it use 90 or 95 because they had it already for their older legacy hardware. Specifically, I prefer Gnu and its current production release (4.30) really isn't 2003 compliant yet. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gfortran/Standards.html#Standards

but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts.

Nope, the easiest one for that purpose would actually be MATLAB (or octave, for that matter). If you want decent O-O with that, you can also use PyLab. Anyone who needs FORTRAN for whatever reason down the road can easily pick it up having been exposed to any of the above, but it should not be taught as a first programming language.

I've never seen a book come delivered on the understanding I don't pass it on to anyone else once I'm done with it.

That only applies if your definition of a book is the paper copy in your hands. The fact you're using a comparison shows that you have encountered (e)books that, in fact, you could not pass on.

But... even the paper copies might fall, if we don't mind our rights.

Right to Read

Yep, With paper, everyone will have the right to read.

Show your professor this, perhaps:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Interesting, wouldn't you say?

The FSF provides a definition for free software and the use of the word "free" follows that definition.
How is that dishonest?

the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts)

Gnash is getting extremely close to being a drop-in Free Software replacement for the Adobe Flash Player. In the linked videos, the ARM director of mobile computing was talking about how the ARM folks were working with Adobe to get Adobe Flash running on the ARM processors, but Gnash has already had ARM support for years. If they're demoing Ubuntu -- a Free Software OS -- on these machines, then why not use a Free Software program to play Flash programs on them? Why not invest their time and energy in the Free Software project?

Rob Savoye (lead dev for Gnash) wrote a bit on this topic on the gnash-dev mailing list:

Jason Guiditta wrote:
> Just saw this...article...bsquared porting flash lite to run on an upcoming dell
> netbook.

Yes, I'm familiar with Bsquared. They're porting the Adobe v10 to
embedded platforms, basically getting rid of Flash Lite, which has
always been somewhat limited. I've talked to several company's also
talking to Bsquared.

> ...This seems like a perfect opportunity to get some
> funding for gnash, since it is already designed to run on so many
> platforms. If a big company like Dell is willing to pay to get flash
> well-supported on their netbook, why could that player not be gnash?

We'd need a contact at a sufficiently high level. Of the companies I
know using BSquared's promised flashplayer for ARM, MIPS, etc... have
decided they'd rather spend hundreds of thousands of $$$ for the
Bsquared solution, than give much smaller amounts to Gnash, which
already runs on the ARM and Android. Big companies that prefer
proprietary software seems to prefer to give business to each other,
regardless pf the much higher price tag. Of the few machines I've played
with the Bsquared plugin on, it usually hung the browser in seconds, and
many other stability problems. But I guess they'll get it right
eventually...

I also talked to Google about Gnash for Android several times, but
they don't appear to be interested in the slightest. Unfortunately, the
only people willing to support Gnash with any funding are people that
believe strongly in free software solutions already. To those people, I
can't thank you enough!

                - rob -

Free Software can be a great benefit to the hardware folks like ARM, and can be great for a mobile platform like Android, but it's sad that these groups don't seem to take any interest in what the Free Software community is offering. That's why it's so important for people to donate time, code, and/or money to projects like Gnash. Software Freedom isn't going to just happen without people like you and me stepping up and getting stuff done.

The FSF considers the QPL a free software licence, even if such distribution restrictions are not explicitly stated in their definition.

Look at the Open Source Definition and compare that with the Free Software Definition. I'm using the definitions from OSI and the FSF because, for all intents and purposes, I think that they have a reasonable claim on defining the corresponding term.

There are some licenses that are OSI-certified but not Free Software Licenses (according to the FSF). These include:

* The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3
* The Reciprocal Public License

I'm also a bit wary of this part of the OSD:

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.

So that's saying that a license could be Open Source and not allow the distribution of patched files? That seems like a bizarre restriction. Their explanation doesn't really sell me:

Rationale: Encouraging lots of improvement is a good thing, but users have a right to know who is responsible for the software they are using. Authors and maintainers have reciprocal right to know what they're being asked to support and protect their reputations.

Accordingly, an open-source license must guarantee that source be readily available, but may require that it be distributed as pristine base sources plus patches. In this way, "unofficial" changes can be made available but readily distinguished from the base source.

The problems with this is that "distribution" can mean any conveyance. So that could mean that to install a program under such a license on a system, you might be required to patch and then compile the code on the actual device. Woe betide anyone who distributes code cross-compiled for a very low power handheld device that doesn't have much in the way of dev tools or system resources. Forget about checking your patched files into a publicly-accessible repository. And if you want to have a web viewer to look at the code, you better be using client-side javascript to do the patching or face the prospect of being in violation of "distribution" laws when you send a pre-patched filed across the Intertubes from your server to the user's browser.

It makes perfect sense to say "If you change this, you can't use our official name for it." I mean, if you bought a can of vegetarian beans and mixed in beef fat, you couldn't just turn around and sell it with the original packaging as you'd be misrepresenting the product. Similarly, if you take the MediaWiki codebase and mix in a few lines of your own code you can't tell people it's stock MediaWiki code. You can tell people that it's based on that codebase, or that you've only change 10 lines, or any other factual statement, but you can't misrepresent the item.

A much more sane rule (which is perhaps still too restrictive for Free Software) would be to request that distributors of modified code offer people the ability to see the diffs as well as the final (changed) code. That way you could take any code and change it and distribute it, but if a user asked for it, you'd need to show them the diffs between what you got from upstream and the changes you made. This would be especially important if the upstream distribution point disappears. For most FOSS projects today, people are using distributed version control like Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc... , so anyone can trivially get the diffs by just checking out the repo and looking at the patches.

Name-calling and quarrelling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message.

Then let's hope the Open Source Initiative's days of calling free software activism "ideological tub-thumping" are behind them. I don't see branding as a means of teaching people about software freedom (the very thing the OSI doesn't talk about in their belief that businesses don't want to hear about user's freedoms), but I'm happy to learn about branding efforts that explicitly teach people about supporting software freedom for its own sake and defending it for future generations so as to build and maintain social solidarity. My experience is that efforts aimed at branding something typically aim for narrow commercial interests: convenience, ease-of-use, and reliability. These things are not bad but they are insufficient for teaching people to value the freedoms to run, share, and modify computer software; those values were chosen to meet the needs of proprietors—the people and organizations that don't respect software freedom.

When it comes to teaching freedom, I don't have the trouble some say they have. I used to host a call-in radio show talking about free software and related issues. I didn't have problems explaining the philosophical difference between free software and open source nor did I have objections to playing various talks by people who went into the implications of this philosophical difference. More recently, I find that the essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software" to be an excellent and not at all insulting essay on the philosophical differences between free software and open source. One of the essay's points that comes up repeatedly is how people who identify with each movement react in the face of powerful proprietary software. Open source advocates would go along with the proprietor, free software activists would reject the proprietor and work on something that would do the same job but respect user's software freedoms:

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

I have to wonder what message any brand sends before I can agree to go along with it. The FSFE essay doesn't make that clear, despite the call to action in the third paragraph from the end.

Sounds like this would be great for the end user. All live recordings would be reduced to free because here is the current value: http://www.archive.org/details/etree . Most all software would be free because of http://www.gnu.org/ and http://kernel.org/ , and http://sf.net/ .

Basically, everything will asymptote to $0.00, and any percentage of that is also $0.00. I doubt the lawmakers thought of it that way, now did they?

The only inherent benefit GNU/Linux has is it's Freedom. And I use it for that Freedom, it is the one distinguishing quality between it and competitors.

I strongly recommend reading Free Software, Free Society (PDF) before you consider switching to a proprietary system.

Even better, use GNU ddrescue (basically, an intelligent wrapper for dd).

It will reads larger blocks when it can, smaller ones when it's finding errors, writes a log file and allows resuming.

I'll go you one better - make a copy, then make a copy of the copy, then recover the 2nd generation copy. That way, you avoid a second pass through the failing drive.

I've had luck with recovery by using GNU ddrescue to first pull everything off the drive I can. AFTER that, if there are still unrecovered sections of disk, it gets a little weird... I have no idea why this works, but... 1) Unplug the drive & let it cool to room temperature. 2) Put it in the freezer. 3) Wait an hour. 4) wrap it in saran wrap (to prevent condensation). 5) Hook it back up. 6) If it doesn't spin up, wait 15 minutes and try again. 7) Once it has spun up, run ddrescue again, using the previously generated log file to recover only the blocks that are still missing from the recovery file.

My favorite tools are a combination of the Trinity Rescue Kit linux boot cd and the Restorer tool.

It depends on the type of failure, but generally, I start with a ddrescue to get an image of the drive, especially if the drive is running bad sectors. Either I set the image to go to a secondary spare drive or I push it across the network. ddrescue is nice in that it doesn't bail when it hits those bad sectors, can run in reverse mode, and eventually it'll get as much as isn't corrupt on the drive into the image.

After establishing the image, the original failed drives go into ESD bags and aren't touched again unless they are to get shipped to one of the expensive clean room type places for their style recovery.

Most of the win32 drive recovery softwares out there can handle reading from an image file, so from here on out, I work with the images I took with ddrescue. Restorer has worked pretty well for me on getting things back from hard drives, CF cards, and even raid sets (figuring out the cluster sizes on the raid can be a pain if you don't happen to know them, but the software does support reassembling raid drives from the images you take of the single drives).

Most of the win32 packages out there have support for making the original images, but I haven't had as much luck with most of them when dealing with severely corrupted drives or with a large scattering of bad sectors. Either they take far too long to make it through the image or they end up failing to get by the bad sectors.

Regardless of what you end up picking, you don't want to use any of the recovery tools that advertise how they can fix the partition table and such on the drive, live . . . any recovery operation that thinks it is ok to 'fix' a drive with data on it you want to recover has the wrong mindset. The data is important, not making the drive work again.

Though that's not stated in the GPL in so many words it is stated in the FAQ.

(Also, it's worth nothing that GPLv3 does away with the term 'distribution.' There's a FAQ about that, too.)

Qt is written in C++ with non-standard add-ons to the core of the language which is passed through moc, a pre-processor, that converts those non-standard elements into compliant C++ code that gcc can process.

I fail to see how this is any different from macro expansion. Other than the simple fact that macro expansion is defined in the C++ standard and moc is not.

The "special-purpose nonsense pre-compiling tools" are there to make building your program easier. Besides, GTK+ not only came up with "special-purpose nonsense pre-compiling tools," they came up with a whole language to ease the development with their toolkit.

I'm not going to bash GNOME people for doing what they feel is needed to increase the productivity of their programmers, I'd hope you'd be kind enough to do the same for the Qt people. ;-)

Finally, you're not required to use the Qt signal-slot system. You can use any callback system you like sigc++, boost, etc... Same case with GTK+.

Time to shamelessly (neither VHDL nor Verilog) plug THUD. If you are a fan of parentheses (there is an "emacs" tag, above, after all), just imagine your LFSR components nicely bolded and stuff....

I use ed, you insensitive clod!

> gcc is miles better than whatever crappy C compiler it originally replaced

That would be...gcc.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History

The FSF is also looking for such a system (as long as it's Free Software). I don't know if Affero GPL is required, although it is probably preferred.

This excludes anything Outlook-touching, so that's an area of non-overlap. Solution is to wean the org off Outlook, if necessary. Not easy for some.

Emacs and vi do both support something very like this via ctags.

It boggles my mind that most of these comments ignore the very explicit political and philosophical goals of the FSF and GNU. So many are quick to "push politics aside" while reaping the benefits of battles won through hard, serious activism. How about actually reading RMS's writing (RTFRMS?), for a start?

The Wired article is pretty bad, which I expect, but the /. summary doesn't provide any context that could make this a good forum for discussing the very important cultural shift we're all experiencing. This link in particular seems appropriate, since the term "Dot-Communism" is thrown around.

wget(1) also does this if you want to build a daily script.

"C (and even assembly) can't realize that the same inputs to a routine always cause the same output, and therefore cache the return value and just return it"

The 'const' function attribute does that and works fine: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Function-Attributes.html

And, C compilers have performed such optimization automatically on a much finer scale than functions for ages (common subexpression elimination), and there really is no reason why future versions won't do it just as much, and on all the same scales as java compilers/vm's eventually will.

"The real issue is, when Java 7, 8 or 9 comes out, ALL java code ever produced will run faster without touching the compiled system."

Sure, a future version will beat something that exists today, future versions of java vm's will be faster than current versions (thank $DEITY)... But so will C compilers... C compilers beat java vm's today, and there is nothing about the java language that can't be done with C, see for example http://llvm.org/

Quite possibly the future of executables (for certain types of executables) is more towards the VM/jit approach, but that is language independent.

While many languages are much easier to use than C (in their application areas), saving development time, and can be for all intents and purposes as fast as it needs to be, saying they will be faster than C will be, is falsely assuming that C compilers have stopped developing further... Perhaps faster than C is today, but not faster than it will be.

imho, the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow is there where you can choose your programming language freely, interface across language barriers with ease, and build a final program from such a mixture of languages if needed.

he does have to hand code his pages using emacs.

You just think he's hand-coding his pages. He's really using a website revision system (what's that?) written partly in Emacs Lisp.

GNU isn't the only Open Source (besides what the GNU people wants you to believe)

Are you a trolling or just ignorant? Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source"

I've been caught in the trap of referencing one license by shorthand when it really is another license that is being discussed

You mean like the GPL vs. the LGPL?

Or to put it more bluntly, there is no "Creative Commons license".... there is a whole bunch of 'em and they are mostly incompatible with each other.

FSF had the same problem with the Open Publication License: the basic license was free, but it allowed option A (no derivatives) and option B (non-commercial), either of which made a work using it non-free.

At least if you were referencing the GFDL, you knew you were talking about a specific document that was well defined without this sort of ambiguity.

The GFDL has its own non-free option, and it is called Invariant Sections.

So perhaps Cisco settled because their lawyers were made aware of the FSF's warnings of litigation, chose to stonewall the FSF, received a copy of the FSF's complaint, saw that the FSF was serious and examined the GPL licenses, examined what their programmers had been doing, figured that they could not win in court, and concluded it wasn't worth fighting? Eben Moglen, longtime GPL defender, says this is how it often goes down (""Why would you want to pay serious money," we have asked, "for software that infringes our license and will bog you down in complex legal problems, when you can have the real thing for free?" Customers have never failed to see the pertinence of the question." he said in 'Enforcing the GNU GPL' and similar discussion at his talks). Getting compliance out of multiple large organizations who could easily pay for lengthy million dollar lawsuits sounds to me like an affirmation of the validity of the GPL.

They want to be able to sell 'parts' of their operating system to people who don't want to pay full price, basically. And they want to make sure that those people only get the parts that they pay for. Oh, and they want to make sure no other developer of operating systems can do something similar.

Why this is news, or anyone cares, I've no idea. It has no effect on those of us that wrote MS systems off as crapware long ago.

--

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html

... Obviously Linux (or GNU/Linux if it wasn't too long to fit) belongs in place of UNIX, but to Maddog's defense Linux hadn't been conceived when he got the plate.

No, GNU's not Unix.

#define min(X,Y) ((X) < (Y) ? (X) : (Y))

Just be careful with your side effects.

(gcc-3 had a side-effect safe <? min operator, though it has since been removed.)

#define min(X,Y) ((X) < (Y) ? (X) : (Y))

Just be careful with your side effects.

(gcc-3 had a side-effect safe <? min operator, though it has since been removed.)

Here ya go.

Right. Again, you missed the point. So forget the restaurant analogy, and use something else.

I buy a chair. If I get it home, and for whatever reason, I decide that I don't like it, I can take it back and get a refund. It doesn't matter if I sat in it. It doesn't matter if I sat it in all damn night, or even took a nap on it. If the chair is in saleable condition, I'll get a refund if I bring it back within a certain period of time.

Same for a TV, DVD player, even video game consoles. But try to do this with most media, and they'll refuse. Why? I guess because they can't prove that you didn't copy it. That doesn't really help the consumer, though.

Like I said, I'm not justifying copyright infringement. Rather, I'm trying to help explain why this feeling exists in a minority of infringers.

Frankly, there's enough junk out there that I don't buy much media sight-unseen. Occasionally, I'll trust a reviewer; most of the time, however, I'll play a friend's copy of the game, movie, or CD, or I'll read a friend's copy of a book. I may decide to purchase a copy for myself after I've returned theirs, assuming that I enjoyed it enough to own. But prior to returning their copy, I haven't purchased it in any of these scenarios--do you think that I'm morally bankrupt because I do this? I've still consumed it without paying. What's the difference if I instead made a copy of it to try out? It's a really thin line, in my opinion.

I'm glad that this thread/posting is about books, because the line there is probably the thinnest. With games or music, you probably want to play or listen at the same time as your friend. But few people read books cover to cover over and over, back to back. Once I've read a book, I'm usually done with it for a year or two, minimum. Loaning it to a friend doesn't impact me in the least unless they damage or lose it. So the question stands--do you think that I'm doing something wrong (not legally wrong, as The Right To Read hasn't come to pass, yet; I'm talking about morals here.)

Let's see the "I don't believe in imaginary property" crowd come out with their memes -- and see them getting a new one ripped out...It is about everything, that's easy to replicate, but hard to design... Be it a book, a song, a shoe-design, or software program...

Um, hate to tell you, but those of us opposed to the use of government force to prevent people from making copies already understand that.

So, what's your point? You'd prefer a scenario where no one had the right to read?

If a course is designed and taught around a textbook, then maybe the guy (or institution) teaching the class ought to owe a royalty to the textbook's author, since his course is a derivative work. I've been arguing for royalty-right as a replacement for copyright for years. But threatening students with jail time for copying textbooks is nothing but a price support for the textbook racket.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

"On the one hand it advocates freedom [...]" is wrong. That movement's founders at the Open Source Initiative thought that dropping the freedom talk would make their movement more amenable to business which is their target audience. That movement's developmental methodology asks people to make choices not based on establishing and preserving user's freedom but short-term value to business.

The movement which focuses on user's freedoms is the Free Software movement which predates the Open Source movement by over a decade. The FSF, whose president Richard Stallman founded the Free Software movement, writes the most popular free software and free documentation licenses.

This difference in philosophy is why, despite both OSI and FSF agreeing to give their respective imprimateurs to various licenses, they reach radically different conclusions about proprietary software. Considering an example where one is faced with choosing to use or reject a powerful, reliable proprietary program, Stallman points out why the latter is better for society in his essay "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software":

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

Also, who cares if its 'open source'.

Its only news if its Free software

Thank you, but I'll store my data on *MY* server, using protocols implemented in *Free* software.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Doesn't GPL have explicit anti-sue protection, with that whole section on lack of implied merchantability or warranty?

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
        it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
        the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
        (at your option) any later version.

        This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
        but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
        MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
        GNU General Public License for more details.

        You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
        along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

From the GNU how-to.

Does anyone know how this would interact with the potential EU law?