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If any sort of this nonsensical "Intellectual Property" will become the standard way of producing research results (as opposed to old-fashioned attribution, to which the students have full rights and the University a moral obligation to protect) then this will mean the death of acedemic science. Period.

If every piece of every half-baked paper will cost $50 to read it, a typical researcher will end up with no viable access to any sort of external research.

The obvious citation here: Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read".

The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them, but the code had little overlap with GNU. BSD systems today use some GNU programs, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately.

Well, saying that is not enough, so let's look deeper: as I said before the first truely free BSD distribution was Net2:

After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this extent, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. For example, vi, which had been based on the original Unix version of ed, was rewritten as nvi (new vi). Within eighteen months, all the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable.

So, let's listen to Keith:

O'Reilly: You are the person who had the bright idea to rewrite all the utilities and the C library, to remove any taint from AT&T. What made you think at the time you could pull this off? Apparently, your colleagues at Berkeley didn't think this was possible. It's an amazing achievement. Bostic: I wouldn't say I had the idea. It's been an awfully long time, but I think that John Gilmore originally suggested it. And, of course, Richard Stallman had obviously been doing similar things for a long time, and he would periodically drop by CSRG to borrow a terminal and we'd argue back and forth about the why and how of free software. I can probably take the credit for making it happen at Berkeley, but like most things, it's hard to point to a single Eureka! moment or person who had the idea. I suppose if we'd truly understood how hard it would be, both in terms of time and legal hassles, we probably wouldn't have tried to do it. But there were lots of goals along the project path that were good in and of themselves, and so it was easy to gradually work our way to the point where we looked around and said "Hey, we're almost done."

The bold is mine in that. Since I suppose that RMS is well known, let's look at John Gilmore, who was a quite active part in developing Net2. From his homepage:

In the early days of computing, almost all software was free. IBM's operating systems, for example, came with source code and the right to copy and modify it. This gradually changed as software became more independent from hardware. Richard Stallman realized the loss to the industry from the change, and formalized the issue with the GNU General Public License and his project to re-implement Unix freely in 1983.

I ported Richard's GNU Emacs to the Sun Workstation that year. I started archiving the free software posted to the Usenet in 1981, and continued through 1987 or so. I started a project to "sift the sands of Berkeley Unix", collaborating with UCB and other Unix hackers to sort the nuggets of original, nonproprietary code out from the background of AT&T-licensed code. Ultimately this resulted in the Berkeley "Networking 2" release which didn't require the recipient to have an AT&T license. In 1985 I wrote the "pdtar" program,

FYI, if Grub guesses the correspondance between the order of drives-seen-by-Linux and drives-seen-by-BIOS incorrectly, you can correct it by editing /boot/grub/device.map. See http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/ Device-map.html for more info.

I have abandoned any hope that we will ever see PCs migrate off the shitty 20-year old architecture that makes this timewasting crap necessary. :(

Before you consider this one of a million angry rebuttals, let me note that your conclusions are your own and you can keep with them regardless of RMS, but...

You misunderstand RMS and the FSF completely. RMS does not and has never stood for Open Source software. RMS does not advocate the technical superiority of an Open development model. In fact, he doesn't even necessarily believe it is technically superior—read his essay on why Open Source misses the point of Free Software.

RMS is however avidly against proprietry software—to the extent that he will not even talk to you about features in Mac OS X, for fear that you might buy it. I can't imagine he would ever say that at some point in time, it becomes okay to allow free software to fall into proprietry code by using a BSD licence.

Probably what you were thinking of is RMS justifying the existence of the LGPL, and you accurately describe one of these justifications. He does believe that at some point (and that that point has come!) we should all switch our libraries to the GPL: Sort of like a bait-and-switch manoeuvre designed to force us all over to only free software.

Have you played GNU Go recently? It used to be a joke. Now, it is great to train against. It is possible to beat it by learning its quirks but what would be the point of that? For me, AI in strategic board games is only useful for training and preparation against human players. If you play it like you would in a normal game, then you are up against a supreme tactician and a pretty reasonable strategist. If you haven't played it recently, then I recommend you try it again.

Why not use your low-power embedded router as your 'always-on' system?

Grab a Linksys WRTSL54GS or some other supported model and install OpenWRT. From there you can install GNU screen, a torrent client, an IRC client, and an instant messaging client of your choosing. The device has a USB 2.0 port so you can attach a large external hard drive or multi-GB flash drive for your torrent downloads.

You'd have to get use to using CLI tools, or if you so choose, you can engineer something web-based using an embedded web server.

This device can remain on 24/7 and consumes about 7-10 watts. On the plus side, you can also use OpenWRT to apply QoS to your torrent downloads so you can keep rocking your FPS or webcam pauselessly on your power-sapping neon-lit dual SLI Aurora.

Wow, is there a long line of people trying to tell you what the "motivation" behind the GPL is, or what?

Okay, here's my take on it (none of my immediate sibling posts have taken up this viewpoint, so I might as well): the GPL is there to protect the rights of the users, not the developers. BSD code is designed to be "free", like free code: you can take it, break it, do what you want with it, put it together in strange new ways, or just throw it away. It's best for things like the network stack, or the FTP program, so instead of rewritting your own (potentially buggy) implementation every time you need one, you just take the official BSD copy. You (the developer) are happy, everybody else (including the BSD developers) is happy because their FTP program/network stack "just works". The BSD developers also don't have to spend time working around broken FTP programs, so they're happy too.

The GPL, on the other hand, protects the rights of the users. I give you my brilliant FTP clone (with the BSD code inside), and it works fine for you - it serves your needs, copies files at unimaginable speeds, and has a cute iguana icon which nods during downloads. The GPL doesn't care about all that. What it cares about is: does this software belong to you, the user? Can you do what you like with it? Can you modify it for any specific needs you have? Can you make, say, a mobile phone version of it so you can use it from your phone? Can you change it to use your own language? These are all things guaranteed to you by the GPL. This creates incentive for users to use GPL software (since they are guaranteed to be able to do whatever they want with it), as well as to contribute back (since they know that whatever modifications are made to the "official" distribution, they will always be free to put their changes back in).

So, the "free" in BSD's license refers to the freedom of the code, while the "free" in GPL refers to the freedoms guaranteed to the user: specifically, the four freedoms the FSF considers essential (when it comes to software, atleast). The GPL is the way it is not because it's trying to establish a "hang-together-or-we'll-all-hang-separately" rule, or because it's trying to establish a free software utopia, but to guarantee the rights of the users of GPL'd software to the freedoms the FSF considers essential.

Sorry if you've heard all this before; it's been a long week, and writing all that was sort of relaxing. =)

When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it. (Additional permissions may be written to require their own removal in certain cases when you modify the work.) You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission.

The Classmate includes Trusted Platform Module 1.2. Is this Intel's version of Treacherous Computing?

The killer is not "gain", but the compulsory nature. If you are forced to do anything, even for "gain", you loose the creativity aspect. On the other hand, if you are allowed freedom, your creativity is enhanced, even if your creativity is for "gain". Yes, personal accomplishment is its own reward, but it is not exclusive to making a profit as well!

And as always, most psychological studies tend to be overly simplistic. While there is some truth in Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator, in actuality, situations are much more complicated than what goes on in the classroom. But even this study hints at my point. It is coercion that kills creativity. It is not really the reward, but how the reward is perceived. If it is presented in a way that invokes fear and anxiety, it is the fear and anxiety that kills creativity. The study misses the true essence of the problem.

From this essay I wrote:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
    "To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite
end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand",
for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or
the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools
to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ...

And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative
work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and
creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based
ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as
opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making
things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much
sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if
you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a
challenging task) is its own reward.

But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a
way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by
automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the
drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything
you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
  one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn
something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50
contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap
themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so
of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

4. Licensing - what licensing?

It has a license.. Please read it carefully. Making copies and distributing the software is permitted in the license. The license does have some restrictions including leaving out the license in your copies.

Downloads: 607
Developer: Edubuntu Team | More programs by this producer
License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
Price: FREE
Last Updated: March 23rd, 2007 18:13
Category: MAIN :: System :: Operating Systems :: Linux Distributions

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Sy stems/Linux-Distributions/Edubuntu-Feisty-Fawn-207 66.shtml

GNU license is here;

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Please read your license.

I find marketing Linux as "easy" to be nothing short of reprehensible. Hiding essential functionality behind a faux-Windows desktop not only makes Linux look like a cheap crappy Windows knock-off, but it de-emphasizes many of the reasons why Linux is better than Windows -- reasons why some people want to leave Windows in the first place. Nobody who really values easiness is going to install a new operating system. If anything they're going to buy a Mac. Linux is sophisticated and powerful, and IMHO the community would be best served by marketing it as such.

For an interesting and somewhat chilling read on what the future might be like if we follow the pessimistic path then read "The Right to Read" by RMS. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Here's the beginning:

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.

The purpose of the GPL (by which I mean RMS's purpose) is not to merely allow the original code to be used however people want, (although that's part of it) but to maximize "software freedom." (Which they define this way.) According to the philosophy of the FSF, Tivoization does not harm the original code, but it harms whoever owns a Tivo, so it must be stopped.

I don't know if I agree with the FSF's philosophy per se, but that's basically their argument.

Not really, because the kernel is explicitly states it is licensed under version 2. To quote the COPYING file:

Bits and pieces are GPLv2 or later, though

Who is going to get a change approval from every single one of them?

So, if you were a company that GPLv3 punished, then you'd be punished when dealing with these new kernels, even though most of the kernel didn't have a GPLv3 specific license.

Now, this assumes that Linus wants GPLv3, which so far he does not. If he doesn't want GPLv3, somebody could attempt to sneak in some patches/new code with a GPLv3-only license, and if Linus put them into the kernel, then the kernel would then have the same GPLv3 baggage. But I suspect that Linus would reject any such patches for now, and if one was snuck in, it would probably be removed if found later.

In any event, even if the kernel remains non-GPLv3, we may find some commonly used packages going GPLv3-only -- and I'm thinking of things like gcc, binutils, fileutils, textutils, etc. If this happens (and it sound very likely), then anybody who doesn't want to be restricted by the GPLv3 restrictions will not be able to distribute updated versions of these packages. In the short term, this won't be such a big deal, but in the long term, it certainly will be.

I appreciate what the FSF is trying to do with GPLv3, but I suspect that it's going to cause the `free software movement' a lot of pain, as companies will probably try to move to BSD from Linux (and even then they won't really get away from the GPL, as the BSDs use gcc as their compiler. Perhaps there will be another gcc fork, with the official GPLv3 version and the fork still being GPLv2 or GPLvwhatever?)

As long as the source is available I don't see what the big deal is about building closed devices with free software.

Let's take a look at the definition of Free Software (emphasis added):

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms.

And there you have it: if your system prevents you from changing the software and running it on that same system, then it is no longer Free because you no longer have freedom #1, the ability to modify the software for your own use. As the quote says, access to the source code is necessary for this, but it's not sufficient. What is necessary and sufficient is access to the source code and the ability to run the modified version!

But the previous version (if any) is still either GPLv2 or "GPLv2 or any later version", and the copyright owner cannot revoke this act of licensing the code under GPLv2. Forks will proceed from the last version that was distributed under GPLv2.

Would be interesting to read that. I did a quick search and turned up this byte interview from 1986 (it references publication of the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs in 1985):

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html

Which now I'll have to invest some time in reading. :-)

Bullshit, go read the license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). It's not that long. It covers copying, distribution and modification.

Without a license, you do not have the right to copy a work copyrighted by someone else. The GPL is the only thing that gives you the right to copy, modify or distribute Linux. Therefore, you need to abide by its terms, even if you only copy it.

Saying that means you must also always copy the source is idiotic, since that's not what the license says. But since this is commercial copying and/or distribution of a binary, they must choose to adhere to either 3a or 3b - accompany with the source, or a written offer to give any third party the source for a fee no bigger than the cost of physically distributing it.

Since that's for any commercial copying, and to any third party, it doesn't matter at all whether it's leased or bought.

In any case, there's on way that GPL version 2 requires them to provide a person anything aside from the source code to any binaries they distributed to that person, or (probably in this case) to anyone that person redistributed binaries to.

"Valid for any third party" means that anyone who has the offer is entitled to take you up on it.

If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.

The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.

1) There's no requirement to make the source freely available anywhere. You can release software under the GPL and charge whatever you like for a copy. The requirement is that whoever buys a copy from you with a GPL license receives the rights to redistribute it under a GPL license - which means they can then give it away for free (as long as the recipient is bound by the GPL too)

Close but no cigar. 1) There's no requirement to make the source freely available anywhere. You can release software under the GPL and charge whatever you like for a copy. The requirement is that whoever buys a copy from you with a GPL license receives the rights to redistribute it under a GPL license - which means they can then give it away for free (as long as the recipient is bound by the GPL too) 2) Nope. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGP LAllowDownloadFee Oh and Firefox is distributed under the Mozilla Public License not the GPL.

People keep referring to Linux and Linux-based distributions with this 'GNU' thing in the name? What's up with that?

I hope you are being funny, but if you are not, I will explain. or even if you are, in case someone else wants to know.

The assertion is that it should be called GNU/Linux because Linux depends on GNU for userspace, build tools, et cetera.

This was once true, but is actually not true any more.

Debian is explicitly called Debian GNU/Linux for this reason. Debian is pretty much the gnuest (but not the newest, ha ha) distribution out there. It has higher ideals than any other Linux that I'm aware of; read the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) for more information.

Richard Stallman has written a whiny diatribe on the subject entitled Linux and the GNU Project. Here is an excerpt:

"What they found was no accident--it was the not-quite-complete GNU system. The available free software added up to a complete system because the GNU Project had been working since 1984 to make one. In the The GNU Manifesto we set forth the goal of developing a free Unix-like system, called GNU. The Initial Announcement of the GNU Project also outlines some of the original plans for the GNU system. By the time Linux was written, GNU was almost finished."

GNU was almost finished? Yeah, except for the lack of a useful kernel. When the HURD finally came out it was extraordinarily limited for an operating system of its day, including a lack of support for filesystems over 2GB.

You may have noticed that I have no sympathy for the view of forcing people to call it GNU/Linux. Why not? Because it's inconsistent. As per the terms of the GPL I am free to fork GCC and call it something entirely different that has nothing to do with GNU. No one is trying to take anything away from GNU or the FSF by calling various Linux distributions Linux. No one is trying to hide the fact that the majority of systems (but again, not all!) are based on or built with the GNU userland. They are only apparently not giving GNU sufficient credit. If GNU needs more credit, that should have been in the license. If it's not worth putting in the license, then shut up already.

As I'm sure many many others will be lining up to respond: Linux is just the kernel. GNU/Linux is the operating system, consisting of the Unix-like commands provided by the GNU Project.

Take a good look at www.gnu.org

for things like text editors ... I can defer looking at the product

Even though I have a TextMate license (from MacHeist), it has not wooed me away from Emacs (I currently use Carbon Emacs). However, I do look at other editors from time to time to get ideas. For example, just seeing "open, edit, and save files on remote servers" in the BBEdit feature list inspired me to figure out Tramp. Code folding in Komodo and another proprietary IDE got me started with outline-minor-mode (which I actually prefer).

All that said, TextMate's rapid success is evidence of pent-up demand that Emacs, vi, BBEdit, et al. were not satisfying. Some of it may be hype and/or fad, but it looks like TextMate is here to stay.

for things like text editors ... I can defer looking at the product

Even though I have a TextMate license (from MacHeist), it has not wooed me away from Emacs (I currently use Carbon Emacs). However, I do look at other editors from time to time to get ideas. For example, just seeing "open, edit, and save files on remote servers" in the BBEdit feature list inspired me to figure out Tramp. Code folding in Komodo and another proprietary IDE got me started with outline-minor-mode (which I actually prefer).

All that said, TextMate's rapid success is evidence of pent-up demand that Emacs, vi, BBEdit, et al. were not satisfying. Some of it may be hype and/or fad, but it looks like TextMate is here to stay.

...if a person came on here complaining that the FSF was after him for violating the GPL, and that person said "yes, I included the code, but I forgot it was there", that there would be much sympathy....

quite frankly I don't think that the 'open source' community in those institutions automatically falls into lockstep behind RMS any more.

Well, no, since RMS has never been part of the "open source" community. He is a leader in the "free software" community.

GPL doesn't restrict anything. Copyright laws do.

A lot of people would disagree with that. Hell, the GPL disagrees with that:

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

See? "restrictions". Just because they are lesser restrictions than the default case of "no rights at all", that doesn't mean they ain't restrictive.

I'm a big fan of the GPL myself, but let's try not to sacrifice accuracy to zealotry here.

Perhaps they should have considered the state of gnash before they made their site flash based.

Seems that it is an issue with flash on 64bit linux. (gnash http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/sucks ... still. Despite what RMS says.)

A flash player that works on FreeBSD, ppc Linux, 64 bit Linux, and other not competely mainstream operating systems will be really nice.

Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.

Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project": "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".

Similarly, Richard Stallman once described Java as being a trap because one could write free software programs in Java that depended on features only non-free Java software provided. He also wrote about what a non-event it was that Sun allowed more people to distribute its then non-free Java software.

Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman and Eben Moglen) to speak in support of their relicensing.

Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.

Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project": "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".

Similarly, Richard Stallman once described Java as being a trap because one could write free software programs in Java that depended on features only non-free Java software provided. He also wrote about what a non-event it was that Sun allowed more people to distribute its then non-free Java software.

Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman and Eben Moglen) to speak in support of their relicensing.

> I've never read the Java license agreement, but I'm sure it has similar intent.

O RLY?

Recommendation: The committee suggests exploring whether or not the notion of copy is an appropriate foundation for copyright law, and whether a new foundation can be constructed for copyright, based on the goal set forth in the Constitution ("promote the progress of science and the useful arts") and a tactic by which it is achieved, namely, providing incentive to authors and publishers. In this framework, the question would not be whether a copy had been made, but whether a use of a work was consistent with the goal and tactic (i.e., did it contribute to the desired "progress" and was it destructive, when taken alone or aggregated with other similar copies, of an author's incentive?). This concept is similar to fair use but broader in scope, as it requires considering the range of factors by which to measure the impact of the activity on authors, publishers, and others.

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier.

Adoption is much more haphazard on Linux Distros, so you may be at much more risk running an application such as SSH on Linux than on OpenBSD even when it is compiled from the same source code.

I agree with you completely. GP's argument is that because Mac can run everything else inside it, it therefore is the ultimate OS.
Get VMware and Linux is the ultimate OS using the same argument.

The ultimate OS should be determined based on merits of the operating system itsself, not what other operating systems you can run to get required features.

Personally as a guy who has on average 6 - 10 consoles open at any one time, Mac OS X isnt flexible enough to be the ultimate OS.
You just cant get the necessary power from it when you need it.

Linux can on the other hand adapt to be n00b friendly or power user friendly.
The fact that you have distros like Ubuntu and Gentoo as two extremes is proof of that.

> Nonsense. Users of the GPL have no authority to make such a restriction and there is none in the GPL. Remember, the GPL is a licence not a contract,
> so it can't restrict what people can do with other stuff, only what they can do with the stuff covered by the licence.

License doesn't take anything away from the users. Let's remember that without any license, the program is protected by the copyright law. So you have permission to distribute it at all. So even you are allowed to do what ever you want with the non-GPLed software, you might not be allowed to do the same with the GPLed software. So in practise this means that you are allowed to distribute "A" and "B", but if you are trying to distribute those together, you no longer have permission to distribute the "B".

Here's the interesting part from the license:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License"
Source: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

The license mentions an example. A program "A" can be distributed under whatever license or without one, but if the "A" is distributed with GPLed software, the whole distribution must be on the terms of the GPL. If A can't be GPled, then it can't be distributed with the distribution.

And the manual is available here. I volunteered work for this briefly, and I was under the impression that it was going to be published in print form as well, but I get the impression from the GNU print manuals webpage that they never did get around to actually printing it.

Octave? . Not that I know what SPSS is, but since you compare it to Matlab and Mathematica. Octave is really good!

Might as well finish the list of episodes. The second season has only two (out of eight) episodes that can still be safely considered fiction:

Episode 2.1 - Academy - The "zipping" (hijacking of satellite feeds) in this episode was inspired by the real-world Captain Midnight hack against HBO. More recently, Falun Gong types have done the same thing against Chinese TV stations.
Episode 2.2 - Deities - We've got fake TV evangelist hucksters hawking all sorts of crap (as we did in 1987), but only now do we have web pages as electronic gravestones. Probably only a matter of time before someone claims they can store your soul in a webpage.
Episode 2.3 - Grossberg's Return - "boost ratings by hacking people's TVs to watch a rival station while their owners sleep" sounds an awful lot like hiring a botnet to perform click fraud against online advertisers.
Episode 2.4 - Dream Thieves - OK, we don't have the tech to record dreams, and even fMRI isn't going to give us such technology within the immediate future, so that one's still in the "fiction" column. Finally!
Episode 2.5 - Whacketts - A "video narcotic" causing people to keep their TVs on 24/7... well... that's what TV's for. True, but almost redundant.
Episode 2.6 - Neurostim - "Zik-Zak introduces Neurostim, a device to directly stimulate the brain and bypass the need to use television for advertising." - we're not at the point of stimulating the brain to desire product, but neuroscience is being used to analyze the effectiveness of advertising.
Episode 2.8 - Baby Grobags - is still fiction, since we can't grow humans outside a womb.

I skipped an episode, deliberately, because it's probably the most important one of the series.

Episode 2.7 - Lessons - "Network 23 censors go a step too far when they try to shut down a secret school in the fringes, because it's using pirated Network 23 instructional programming" could be ripped straight out of today's headlines. The episode is essentially a video version of RMS' famous essay "The Right To Read", except that Max Headroom predated Stallman's essay by eleven years.

Yet another step towards "trusted" (treacherous) computing. A small part of the article:

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing", large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. (...)

Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what it does;(...) It's not surprising that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put you at a disadvantage.(...) These malicious features are often secret, but even once you know about them it is hard to remove them, since you don't have the source code.

In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would make it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.

Read the rest in the above linked article. It is an interesting reading, even for the ones familiar with it, as we march slowly and steady to the worst case scenario predicted there.

IMHO, the major difference is that Linus is primarily a doer/engineer while RMS is primarily a talker/philosopher. Linus sees GNU and GPL etc as tools to get to where he wants to be, while RMS is is more interested in the almost religious pursuit of GPL and the software just comes along for the ride.

Witness the whole GNU/Linux naming debate: For RMS, this was a very important milestone http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html; Linus thought it ridiculous, but didn't burn much energy in debating it.

Based on my experience, the primary reason why we still don't have a stable Hurd at this point is infighting. There are several camps of people within the Hurd development "team", some of them so far separated they refuse to even be in the same IRC channel as eachother. This infighting has a few different causes, the main one being with people's impatience with eachother's ideas. Another cause is, more or less, grandstanding. Also, the fact, that some people want to port Hurd over to L4 or Coyotos while others want to stay with Mach doesn't help, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd#Choice_of_mi crokernel

RMS has little to do with any of it.

OTOH, there is a pretty high-priority movement to get GNU(/Hurd) packaged and officially released, which, based on what I last saw, has the support of everyone mentioned above: http://gnu.org/s/packaging & http://www.update.uu.se/~ams/home/todo

I mean seriously, when my own fully functional version of "echo" is 4116 bytes stripped, how come GNU's is 13880, and all it has mine doesn't is --help and --version? (Both are dynamically linked.

See it for yourself:
OpenBSD `echo': http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/bin/echo /echo.c?rev=1.6&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
GNU `echo': http://cvs.sv.gnu.org/viewcvs/coreutils/coreutils/ src/echo.c?view=markup

GNU version supports de-escaping the parameters before printing them while your version probably doesn't.

If you want to test your free (as in speech) software with recent GCC, there's a little farm (9 bi Pentium 3 1GHz) I help maintain:

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

See "How to get involved" chapter to get an account.

What makes you think the court's going to say "no no no, this is GPL and you're wrong, sorry" and not "they created their own license, what makes you think the condition is not valid?"

GNU and RMS are not opposed to *commercial* software. They are opposed to *proprietary* *closed-source* software.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# Commercial