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I'd recommend you read the articles at gnu.org/philosophy/ because many of the arguments you raise are discussed there. Most notably the ethics of proprietary software, defining one's work as bringing "value" to "end users", how the GPL creates free software (nobody is ever required to distribute their derivative, and when NeXT tried to distribute a non-free GCC derivative the FSF stepped in and made NeXT comply with the GPL thus causing an increase in the amount of free software), and the myth of the "freedom of choice". You could probably read any of the essays there in any order, but I'd recommend starting at the top and working your way down if you want to understand what the free software movement stands for and why.

If you prefer to watch or listen instead of read, there are a lot of recordings of people (Richard Stallman, Brad Kuhn, Eben Moglen, to name a few) talking about why free software exists.

If you don't want to license under the GPL, that's your power. But it's not a GPL licensor's job to let you get something for nothing by distributing non-free derivatives. Go write your own software and use the power of licensing to set down terms you think find amenable.

I wouldn't mind discussing the issue with you but they do a very good job of covering the basics of why free software exists and I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to good explanations. Sadly Slashdot cuts off discussions after a while, so there's not much time to discuss what they said here. I've got a real email address listed on my Slashdot profile, if you'd care to discuss free software further we could take the discussion there.

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

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
-- Richard Stallman, The Right To Read

As for the GPL, it was created as a response to the current insane copyright and 'IP' laws, to help ensure freedom of software and computing. It leverages copyright to do this, fighting fire with fire so to speak. A reasonable copyright system would obviate the need for the GPL. I suggest you read up on the the philosophy behind the GPL if you're going to comment on it.

Your argument is analogous to saying that if racial equality were reached then the need for organizations like the NAACP would be gone, so members of the NAACP should fight against racial equality.

GNU radio

http://www.tug.org/

Use a front end of choice if you want. E.G.:-

http://www.latex-project.org/
http://www.lyx.org/
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex

A Google search on "tex frontend" will yield many more.

Honest, before all the Deities, it's that simple.

Is your working set honestly over 8GB? Your dataset might be extremely large... but I would think that for the most part you'd get along just fine with swapping out to a decently fast device and your working set would be considerably below 8GB.

Personal computers do not have support for more than 8 GB for a good reason, there isn't I/O capacity to use that much memory. There's no use having memory if you cannot transfer data to and from it.

However, the problem is that he uses Matlab. Perhaps he could get better performance using Octave with Atlas optimization, but in the end, only compiling in C with assembly language optimization will guarantee the best results. I have heard from several people that Matlab has problems when the data sets become large.

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
 
    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
    source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
    1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
 
    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
    cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
    customarily used for software interchange;

The FSF doesn't do anything "open source", that's a different movement with a different set of values (values that lead directly to wondering if developmental efficiency consistently producing better software is a lie). The FSF exists to promote software freedom, the freedoms to study, share, and modify computer software so we can organize society around increased social solidarity. The free software movement is a social movement which is not about "innovation", it's about freedom.

If you want to learn what the free software movement works for and how it differs from the open source movement, you should read Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software. The free software movement appreciates the support members of the open source movement show it (members of both movements they work together on practical projects, and the OSI and open source advocates use FSF-written licenses such as the GNU GPL/LGPL/FDL), but the free software movement has a different philosophy which leads to radically different conclusions about proprietary software. The free software movement does not wish to be lumped in with the open source movement.

Of course this doesn't mean free software hackers strive for less powerful or less reliable software. But instead of waiting for some proprietor to fix things for us, we all have the freedom to learn how to fix/improve the program ourselves or get someone else to do it for us (even commercially). By contrast, all proprietors are monopolists. The philosophy of software freedom says that it is better to improve a less reliable, less powerful free program than to use a more powerful, more reliable non-free program to do the same job. Proprietary software is anti-social and therefore proprietary software should be obviated. Open source advocates disagree, seeing software development not as a social activity with ethical ramifications but instead as a technocratic act to be done in the most efficient way that benefits businesses first. So open source advocates have no problem advocating for software that would not qualify as "open source" such as proprietary 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.

Not yet, but some day. RMS isn't just a programmer.

(*) As an aside, it is beyond me how some (note I say some) supposed libertarians can advocate mandatory opening of product specs. Apart from the irony of a "libertarian" requesting more regulation, this would reduce freedom, not improve it. One of the key aspects of freedom of speach is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.

So, not only users pay for Adobe products, not only these products are closed-source, but the user is also feeding the business of a profit-making analytics company as well as helping some marketing guys in Adobe justify their bonuses without the user getting any payment. User software usage data have value, so why should the user give up their usage data with no payment? Why should Adobe users give all this value for free without something in return? We do this with free software like Gimp (via ingimp), but I see no reason why one should help closed-source shops this way. One could say that users are paid in terms of better software releases, but I call bullshit: if Adobe was so concerned about this they would make their stuff free. We all know very well that there is no business reason (apart from legalities over code copyright belonging to third parties etc) to keep the code hidden, since making money with free software is not only possible but many times easier (and more ethical, since the user is not coerced in any way). This is the best way to conduct business: Create value without coercion. The popularity of a free software package can quickly be monetised, for example soon-to-be-a-Dr Drupal founder recently got $7 million out of the blue. I actually could go on to even say that not making a piece of software free is stupid from all perspectives (business, ethical, etc).

So, not only users pay for Adobe products, not only these products are closed-source, but the user is also feeding the business of a profit-making analytics company as well as helping some marketing guys in Adobe justify their bonuses without the user getting any payment. User software usage data have value, so why should the user give up their usage data with no payment? Why should Adobe users give all this value for free without something in return? We do this with free software like Gimp (via ingimp), but I see no reason why one should help closed-source shops this way. One could say that users are paid in terms of better software releases, but I call bullshit: if Adobe was so concerned about this they would make their stuff free. We all know very well that there is no business reason (apart from legalities over code copyright belonging to third parties etc) to keep the code hidden, since making money with free software is not only possible but many times easier (and more ethical, since the user is not coerced in any way). This is the best way to conduct business: Create value without coercion. The popularity of a free software package can quickly be monetised, for example soon-to-be-a-Dr Drupal founder recently got $7 million out of the blue. I actually could go on to even say that not making a piece of software free is stupid from all perspectives (business, ethical, etc).

Nice Article about "Intellectual Property"

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

So less than one percent believe in IP. If not Internet Protocol, which network layer protocol do they believe in?

But seriously, there are reasons not to believe in "intellectual property" even if you do believe in copyright. For one thing, "intellectual property" confuses copyright law, patent law, and trademark law..

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.html

I was taught assembler
in my second year of school.
It's kinda like construction work --
with a toothpick for a tool.
So when I made my senior year,
I threw my code away,
And learned the way to program
that I still prefer today.

Now, some folks on the Internet
put their faith in C++.
They swear that it's so powerful,
it's what God used for us.
And maybe it lets mortals dredge
their objects from the C.
But I think that explains
why only God can make a tree.

For God wrote in Lisp code
When he filled the leaves with green.
The fractal flowers and recursive roots:
The most lovely hack I've seen.
And when I ponder snowflakes,
never finding two the same,
I know God likes a language
with its own four-letter name.

Now, I've used a SUN under Unix,
so I've seen what C can hold.
I've surfed for Perls, found what Fortran's for,
Got that Java stuff down cold.
Though the chance that I'd write COBOL code
is a SNOBOL's chance in Hell.
And I basically hate hieroglyphs,
so I won't use APL.

Now, God must know all these languages,
and a few I haven't named.
But the Lord made sure, when each sparrow falls,
that its flesh will be reclaimed.
And the Lord could not count grains of sand
with a 32-bit word.
Who knows where we would go to
if Lisp weren't what he preferred?

And God wrote in Lisp code
Every creature great and small.
Don't search the disk drive for man.c,
When the listing's on the wall.
And when I watch the lightning burn
Unbelievers to a crisp,
I know God had six days to work,
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

> Are there any GPL'd Open Source browser plug-ins that can preform equivalent functionality to Flash/Shockwave?

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

1. Java is not a 150 MB download. Just checking download sizes for my platform now, Flash player is 3MB and Java is 18MB. Yes, it is much larger (again - it does much more).
2. Flash player has had its share of browser-crashing, so I don't think the argument that Java crashed browsers is valid. In fact Flash still has crashing / hanging issues on many browsers (recent IE7 and Firefox issues come to mind).
3. DHTML has been around for a long, long time - animations in web pages using javascript and HTML has been possible since before Flash was a de-facto standard.
4. I'm not trying to fool anybody that Flash is going away. Merely educating people that it's not the only solution for what it does, and often it's not the best answer for a given end result. Should designers learn another programming language? Honestly I've never used the Java media framework tools so I don't know how big of a deal that is. I do know that designers are a finicky bunch and will stick with Adobe until the world's end even if there are better/cheaper/easier tools out there for some reason.
5. Just because something is the most popular solution / product, doesn't mean it's the best. Keep an open mind.

How are you defining "legitimate"?

The announcement suggests a similar inversion of ethical and legal when it says "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent."; does this mean that if there were no legal uses BitTorrent would be "wrong and unethical"?

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

here is how you can help them

No, silly. Ed is the standard editor

Perhaps you should check the definition of free software, or the Debian Free Software Guideline (which is the basis of the Open Source Definition).

Any license that does not grant free redistribution (not free as in beer, free as in freedom---as in that the re-distributor is free to charge money for the service, if someone would pay) is definitely not free, and most likely not open source.

I don't know why people get these wrong impressions that "free software" == "anti-commercial", but nothing could be further from the truth. Free software is just about as Laissez-Faire, free, capitalistic economic system as you can possibly get (free from government-granted monopolies, etc.). Licenses that "play nice" with communities by "graciously" granting non-commercial uses is definitely better than completely proprietary licenses (or a lack of one), but it's only halfway there since any such license still restricts your freedom in ways that are not acceptable.

If you aren't totally convinced still why these "non-commercial only" licenses are wrong, here's a very simple reason why: Those licenses are GPL-incompatible, since GPL does not allow addition of restrictions with small exceptions, and any project or software using those restrictive licenses is excluding a lot of code out there that is already released under GPL.

Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail. Nothing wrong with that, but as fossil fuels become more expensive, we'll find more and more "old tech" make a comeback.

The biggest deal in alternative energy right now is the windmill, which have been used for what, 1,200 years? Now we have a (gasp!) sailing ship! Pretty soon we'll go back to using the electric car which was very popular in the early days of the automobile.

No, basic technologies are not new - what's new are refinements. For example, Linux is a re-implementation of a 35 year old Operating System having the chief innovation of a license change. I'm not knocking the quality that Linus has put into the Linux kernel, but Linux is written to be POSIX compliant, so while drivers are nice, Linux is basically no different than any other UNIX but for the license difference.

Innovation can come from some incredibly low-tech, unlikely places. For example, this guy has won numerous awards for sticking a pot inside a pot and filling the middle with wet sand - managing to solve a serious problem in Africa for low-cost refrigeration.

I guess what it comes down to is this: Technology is valuable when it works, not when it's complex. There's lots of very, very, very simple technology that nonetheless works very, very, very well.

Will the opening of AMF help Gnash http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ?

You are forgetting that OOXML is not even a "de facto standard" yet. Vast majority of office suite users still have old versions of MS Office that doesn't recognize OOXML documents. Why should Free Software roll over to support it ... when we have real chance of finally getting people not to use .docx for anything but for private uses? Why must we assume that everything MS does will succeed? Vista was a disaster, and maybe the whole new Office format will be a disaster, too!

But ... in the end, if OOXML does become prevalent and we can't convince braindead secretaries not to send .docx attachments, then there is a real need for OOXML support in free software---and somebody will do that, when the time comes. Somebody will "do it right" (i.e. in a MS Office compatible way, since MS Office itself does not implement the full OOXML spec). But until then, there is no rational (idealistic or pragmatic) for trying to support a format that only lives in Imaginationland (i.e. fully standards-compliant OOXML).

Because ... you see, there's a huge gap between a pragmatist and sycophantic yes-man. I hope you see it.

P.S. The HURD vs. Linux comparison is so unfair, if that's what's being used as idealist vs. pragmatist. The only difference between HURD and Linux is that Linux made the right initial design decisions (monolithic kernel that turned out to be easier to debug than a microkernel + userspace daemons). If you really want to compare success of idealism vs. pragmatism in that oversimplified way, compare the whole GNU project with Linux. Would you be happier with your system minus the Linux kernel (essentially BSD with GNU tools), or would you be happier with your Linux kernel but no GNU userspace tools (essentially the rest of the GNU/Linux OS), that would be ... like, oh, Solaris with its kernel replaced by Linux or something.

So if Paint.NET's entry somehow appeared lower in some search engine's rankings, writing and distributing non-free software would somehow be justified? No, it wouldn't, but only if you value software freedom for its own sake. This shows yet another instance of how different the free software and open source philosophies are: open source philosophy will lead to defending endorsing programs which don't qualify as open source (which, I take it, is the movement you advocate for since you refer to "closing the source").

If what you're saying is true, I will not recommend the use of Paint.NET because that program no longer respects its users software freedom. I will recommend The GIMP instead, even for people who find The GIMP to have far more features than they really need (as so many do with the proprietary Photoshop program).

So if Paint.NET's entry somehow appeared lower in some search engine's rankings, writing and distributing non-free software would somehow be justified? No, it wouldn't, but only if you value software freedom for its own sake. This shows yet another instance of how different the free software and open source philosophies are: open source philosophy will lead to defending endorsing programs which don't qualify as open source (which, I take it, is the movement you advocate for since you refer to "closing the source").

If what you're saying is true, I will not recommend the use of Paint.NET because that program no longer respects its users software freedom. I will recommend The GIMP instead, even for people who find The GIMP to have far more features than they really need (as so many do with the proprietary Photoshop program).

to the solution to your problems.

No worries, mate. I'm a ham radio op... and a programmer... I'll have an open source control program along shortly.

Alternatively, I could write support into GNU Radio.

Then why do they have an essay in the philosophy section decrying the term "intellectual property"?

Or didn't you read it?

P.S. I am the submitter.

thanks to the wonderfully crappy proprietary, closed source Flash plugin for Firefox on GNU/Linux.

Don't forget about Tramp. If you can reach a machine by pretty much any means, then Emacs can edit files on it.

One word:
screen

Reattaching after disconnecting from a remote computer is extremely useful.
It can also copy-paste.

Surely everyone knows that they should be using ed, yes?

What good is an unnecessary war between EMACS and vi without a comment touting the merits of ed?

Ed is the standard text editor!

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Dired.html#Dired

Apparently it's pronounced "Dur Ehd", not "Dire'd". Seems like a pretty poor choice of name to me...

You have a point. I'm not advocating mob rule. A representative government should act like a shock absorber for democracy and prevent sudden fits of passion from leading to bad decisions. Arguably, Prohibition was a failure of that damping mechanism.

But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)

You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?

I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.

Also, copyright is not property. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.

If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?

Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists.

Oh, some of us understand just fine. It's the part where people don't agree with how the law is written or enforced that get you into problem territory.

In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

No, they usually say that IP isn't really property because it's not truly rivalrous. Sure, the law creates rights that are in rivalrous in an artificial way, but you can have two people listen to the same tune whereas two people can't eat the same grape. You may have heard people refer to IP as "imaginary property" recently. It's not because they don't know what IP is supposed to stand for, but because they don't agree with it.

It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Mind-boggling? That sounds more like a statement of ignorance to me. I don't have any trouble understanding why they'd think that, nor do I have trouble understanding those with views like yours. When I hear that something is "mind-boggling" I usually find out that people are trying to ascribe intelligence to something (or someone) that lacks it, or that they haven't thought something through. In this case, it would appear to be the latter.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

The GPL IS a subversion of copyright law after a fashion. RMS wrote against that notion that we need copyright because it's used to enforce the GPL quite specifically in one of his essays (yes, you can't enforce the GPL without copyright law, but you don't really need it, either). You might want to talk to the man who wrote it before you make claims like that. I did. [1]

Anyhow, to get back on topic, I don't see how you can say that not supporting copyright law makes them an infringer. I also don't think that that essay you linked to was written out of ignorance. It's written because people are fed up with this crap.

Perhaps you haven't yet realized this, but the more laws we make, the more criminals there are. Obviously, the more we criminalize the things people are already doing, the more people who are going to break them. And you can't have fewer than zero people breaking a law, so adding to the laws will certainly never create fewer criminals. The point isn't the ridiculous notion that we could just abolish all laws and have "zero" criminals. Some things, after all, are worth the cost of criminalizing them. But it's a mistake to think that laws are without cost. And here, a reasonable person can make the case that we're simply better off if we don't criminalize something, whether or not we like or agree with it.

Of course, you seem to find that "mind-boggling" :] I suggest you think it through a little more. The notion was not formed without the use of rational thought, so an intelligent person like you should be able to understand it... right?

[1] To prove it, I'll point out that I also read the confusing words manifesto. Whereas RMS would like us all to stop using the word, I have chosen to subvert it with the term "Imaginary Property" not unlike how RMS chose to subvert copyright with the GPL rather than hoping to abolish it. RMS disagrees with me about that term, BTW, in that it still lumps together at least three disparate areas of law, but you'd have a hard time finding someone with whom he agrees about everything :]

You've never heard of Scilab or octave? Or the older rlab?

Your criticisms stem from the inadequacies of the open source movement which casts aside software freedom in pursuit of a philosophy focused on developmental methodology. In fact you echo one of the points of that essay on how the two movements' philosophies differ irreconcilably: anyone who pushes aside software freedom will think a reliable and powerful non-free program is preferred to a less capable less reliable free program (free software being software we can choose to improve to make it reliable and powerful). If you were taking software freedom and social solidarity more seriously, you would realize how petty concerns about licensing costs are (free software advocates strongly push for making as much money as you can with free software) and how much more important it is to treat one's fellows as friends and neighbors. Part of this means not trapping your fellows into a monopoly for support, recognizing that no proprietor is truly interested in your project or your well-being as a user (except to the extent that leads to giving them more control), and that therefore settling for partial freedom is unwise.

And even within the meager realm of popularity (which is truly a secondary concern), we can see FLOSS is the primary choice on the server: email servers and web servers, for instance, are two major parts of what most people do on the Internet daily and they rely on FLOSS to make sure things are reliable. I see more people using OpenOffice.org and Firefox, among other desktop and client-side programs.

So no, pursuing software freedom respects the most important points. Free software addresses challenging and important considerations in society. A technocratic approach centered on development efficiency misses those points.

You probably has a transmission error while getting the copy of the GPL you read, since it apparently was missing section 6...

As for your last sentence: see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SourceAndBinaryOnDifferentSites.