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Maximum Latency for ISPs?
fluor2 asks: "My ISP is providing me 8mbit ADSL, and my speed is in fact 8mbit (downstream). However, we all know that there is no relation between transfer rate and latency, eg, a high transfer rate and high latency will kill your FPS games. A packet that travels through the sky and up to a satellite is bound to give high latency. Using pathping, I discovered that my ISP provides me with a latency of 22ms before my sent packets are sent out of my ISP's backbone (6 hops). I have a friend that also tried the same, and he got only 10ms before he was out of his ISP's network. I know 22ms is decent, but I still think that it's far too high if one uses IP-phones and similar. What kind of latency can we accept for a normal 8mbit ADSL connection, and isn't it about time that we get more focus on this subject?"
First off, we all believe in the basic idea of copyright here, even the gnu hippies. He who creates something is allowed to dictate the terms under which it is sold or used for gain. If *you* would like to write some software and release it to the public domain, you are more than free to do so.
Some people of the FSF mind have a different plan, which is "I want to release my work to the public domain for people to use, but I don't want someone then taking advantage of my generosity by adding a small tweak to my idea and selling it at a greedy profit - therefore I'll place a copyright restriction which dictates that you can only redistribute my work (plus your derivations of it) under the same original free terms, to keep the greedy people from taking advantage of my contribution."
Then there's people like you, who are handed this freebie which has anti-greediness protections, and bitch about it not being fully free. Please, cry me a river. The authors of whatever GPL program you'd like to make money derivating could have just locked their code up and sold it proprietary. Instead they gave you a limited free gift, and you're bitching about the limits. Go write your own damn code, and you can be as public domain or greedy as you want to be with it.
11*43+456^2
I'm going to probably get modded down for this.. but.
I do write my own code, and I release it under the BSD license; so I also do release it to the public, for whatever use they please.
But under a less-restrictive license that isn't going to let me make profit over my OWN work at a later date.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
No, on two counts. Firstly, like BSD, GPL is all about taking off restrictions. Without the licence, the general public get no access to the code at all.
Whackers like Microsoft regularly complain about the "viral nature" of GPL but what they really mean is that they can't flood the market with bent versions of it that nobody else can see the code for (think Kerberos, then heark back to file format and MS-DOS programming changes intended to break Lotus 1-2-3, or DR-DOS, or Word Perfect, or even Microsoft's nobbling of their own Word 6 on the Mac - the intent is the same even if the licence is totally different). Without the GPL, Microsoft would have no access at all to the most important parts of the SFU package which they sell, they would have had to invest a fortune in writing their own.
But finally, anarchy only works if everybody is willing to play fair. In other words, anarchy only actually works with idealised humans. If your human falls outside your parameters, boot them out of your commune. The sand in this vaseline in the general sense is that Planet Earth currently has nowhere to boot unsuitable people to - and what eventually happens in similar Real Life(tm) situations is you end up with pleasant, peacful, well-intended people killing off the unsuitable candidates. The GPL ensures fair play, or at least goes a long way towards it.
In short, "they only deserve freedom, who are prepared to defend it", the motto from ANZAC House, here in Perth. Yes, BSD looks nice, is nice in some circumstances, in that it has less strings attached than GPL - but that also opens it to more abuse than the GPL. Choose your licence, choose your consequences.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Er, what in the BSD licence prevents you from profiting from your own code later?
What in the GPL prevents you from profiting from your own code later? Just the other contributors. You can only profit from your own pieces of code, which in a big project are going to be pretty close to useless by themselves. And that's totally fair.
I also reckon that it's totally fair, fine and dandy if you choose to release your own code under a licence which is open to abuse. It's your code, and I refuse to ping you for throwing it to the wolves. Now please bite your tongue (fingers?) about what I do with my code.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing