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RMS & FSF Directors To Meet With FSF Members
Free Software Foundation writes "Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Bradley Kuhn, and the rest of the FSF leadership are hosting a rare FSF members meeting in Cambridge, MA on March 27, where they will tackle topics including, 'The Dangers of Software Patents', SCO, 'Free Software in a Global Economy', and 'The State of the Foundation'. FSF members will have ample opportunity to gripe, praise, dialog, network, and eat."
i hope the xfree team goes there and talks the license issue with them
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Get out and support your GNU Organisation if you're anywhere around! Networking in reality still means a lot more than its virtual counterpart.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
don't these things happen yearly? (according to the website, they do)
-ninjaneer
I'm not saying that this is always better, but it does matter to a lot of people.
I'm beginning to wonder if SCO's second biggest negative impact (after the FUD it spreads) is all the time it is taking away from folks that would otherwise be having fun making open source software better.
I can't even begin to imagine how many man-hours have been blown obsessing about, discussing, worrying, or protesting SCO's latest actions. It really is appalling.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem like there's much point in "fighting" SCO any more. There isn't anyone in the tech community that takes them seriously. They are going to run out of money unless they get more cash influxes. It seems really unlikely that they will ever win even a minor lawsuit, much less something that will impact Linux. To the best of my knowledge, they aren't doing much to prevent Linux adoption -- there were a lot of journalists talking about how SCO might have a chance a couple of months ago, but it seems like everyone is pretty negative now (though I haven't read pure business publications for a while, so I might just be out-of-touch here).
Is there really any point to dealing with SCO any longer? It just wastes our time, and frankly, if I'm going to waste an hour of my life, I'd rather do it playing a video game or modeling something or writing software or cooking something than agonizing over SCO.
Unlike most Slashdot topics, SCO usually doesn't bring anything new or interesting to the table. A SCO article doesn't let me know about new LED displays that haven't existed before or a new VM about to be released or anything, really. Most comments in SCO articles are just jokes about SCO or McBride -- real analysis mostly happens at groklaw.
I just think -- every time Alan Cox posts about SCO or an indignant open source author spends a day disproving an new fabricated SCO claim so that they can come out with an analysis on groklaw, that's a driver patch that doesn't get applied, or a bit less threading work that can be done.
Frankly, even if the whole tech world started talking negatively about Windows, the kernel coders at Microsoft are unlikely to notice or care -- to them, that's just some crap for the PR people to deal with. They wouldn't let it affect them. SCO is wasting a good deal of time, time which actually does have value. Aside from passively providing the opinion that SCO is full of it when they come up in conversation, there doesn't seem to be much useful stuff that can be done any more.
Now, if you're really into IP law, of course, the case is interesting. But I just have a really hard time getting upset over whatever latest outrage SCO has come up with to stay in the press. I mean, who *cares* anymore? Noting we're going to say is going to stop them from making claims and getting quoted. Everyone in the tech world already thinks SCO is absolutely ludicrous, and IBM and Red Hat and Novell and God knows who else are already busily dealing with the situation. I'm sure the moment SCO crosses a legal line somewhere (and sooner or later, they have to), there will be a countersuit, maybe with a preliminary injunction against SCO stopping them from making new claims. My time is too valuable to me, and Darl McBride too worthless of a human being, to spend it on him.
The strength of the Open Source world is that one person contributes thoughts, code, analysis, whatever, and then that work propagates and is used and built upon by as many other people as are interested. Finding SCO's logical fallacies is work that is useless by the end of next month, as they're onto something new. It doesn't feel *good* when you're done with it. It's terribly inefficient and ineffective, even if it feels cathartic at the moment.
May we never see th
Nonsense. "Free" software is fine for simple systems and copying existing systems but lack the ability to be truly innovative. As the need complexity of systems increase, the free software copies will fall further behind their counterparts. The simple reason is that the number of people with the experience to create and maintain these complex systems will decrease. Unless the economics of free software change, you will be unable to attract many experienced professionals. Many OSS systems now are created in the developers "free time" - this does not scale well.
The only thing that "free" software competes on is price. The current corporate interest in "free" software is in the ability to get software systems for free.
As these companies start running out of their VC and IPO capital, this concept will disappear.
RMS is an (admitted) Marxist. He applies these concepts to the software world, but would like to see them extended to encompass as many fields as possible.
BSD/MIT-style licences are inherently libertarian: they maximize individual liberty, and leave it up to the individual to decide whether or not to contribute their work to the public commons.
The GPL is inherently socalist: it maximizes social benefit by forcing individuals to contribute their work to the communal body of code.
Socialism isn't necessarily a bad thing, just be honest and admit what you are doing -- taking property rights away from the individual and giving them to society as a whole.
It is one thing to say "My code is free; therefore you may use it however you wish"; it is an entirely different thing to say "My code is free; but only if you use it the way I want you to."
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
No, this is why the GPL is MORE free than BSD style licenses- because the changes made to them will remain free as well. Freedom that can be taken away at someone else's whim is not free. Its like claiming we'd be more free if the government could take away our right to free speech or public assembly at will.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I beg to differ. Neither can be said to be more free than the other. The GPL text may be more restrictive than BSD-like licenses, but the GPL also creates an environment that is in some ways more free than others. The distribution of GPL code under the GPL can never be restricted by copyright law, not even by the author of a program based on existing GPL code. Code released under "more free" licence types can be restricted in their distribution by copyright, and copyright is no less of an artificial restriction than the GPL.
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do anything. If you don't want to contribute your code to a GPL project, then don't distribute any modifications you've made. You're always able to use it for yourself or within your organization as you see fit. And of course, you're free not to use it at all
The GPL is as libertarian as any other contract freely entered into by informed sentient beings. You seem to have a rather broad definition of socialism. I've always understood socialism to be the state whereby the workers own the means of production, or more generally the excercise of significant economic control by the "people". If socialism means "anything socially beneficial", then it seems to be a less useful term in political and economic discourse.
It's absolutely nothing like that.
Under a license like the BSD license, a company could take the code and make modifications to it and not release the changes. Okay, their particular set of changes is not freely available. So what? This has not deprived you of anything. What did you have before the company made the changes, that you no longer have afterward?
?If the GPL is going to change history, I have yet to see it."
It could be sooner than you think. (SCO vs. IBM)
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"taking property rights away from the individual and giving them to society as a whole."
I think that you should actually read the words on GPL. For example, how does GPL control the useage by the end user? Perhapes in the redistrubution but not in the useage. Second, GPL does not take property rights away as the creator must chose to use GPL.
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Am I the only one who thinks, instead of getting together to discuss "legal issues" and "licenses," maybe people should be getting together to, I don't know, discuss furthering the Linux desktop movement through some sort of unification effort?
This SCO thing will blow over. The real world expects results, not some licensing meeting between old UNIX hackers. I'd rather they be drawing up designs for an innovative desktop.
"Sufferin' succotash."
well said. that echoes the thoughts of my optimistic side, but my pessimistic side keeps whispering in my ear that the powers that be will somehow neutralize him to preserve present power relationships.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
SCO is claming that GPL is invalid, so how can this lawsuit be a mere footnote? If IBM wins, RMS could be a giant in the history books. If SCO wins, Darl will be a giant in the history books and RMS will be a mere footnote (as a loser).
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