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Will Stallman Kill the "Linux Revolution?"
frdmfghtr writes "The October 30 issue of Forbes Magazine has an article speculating that Richard Stallman's efforts to rewrite the GPL could threaten to 'tear it apart.' The article describes how the GPLv3 is expected to be incompatible with the GPLv2, causing trouble for Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat. The article wraps it up: 'And a big loser, eventually, could be Stallman himself. If he relents now, he likely would be branded a sellout by his hard-core followers, who might abandon him. If he stands his ground, customers and tech firms may suffer for a few years but ultimately could find a way to work around him. Either way, Stallman risks becoming irrelevant, a strange footnote in the history of computing: a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission against his own program and went down in flames, albeit after causing great turmoil for the people around him.'"
Linux is going to stick with GPLv2 regardless of what the FSF does with GPLv3. That has little to do with Linus disliking GPLv3, and much do to with not being able to track down all the contributors and get them to agree to a license change. GPLv3 is not going to cause any trouble for Linux vendors. It's certainly not going to "kill the Linux Revolution". There is nothing in GPLv2 or GPLv3 that prevents a Linux distribution from containing various programs under various licenses, just as Linux distributions today contain code under GPLv2, BSD, MIT, and other licenses. And GPLv3 doesn't make Stallman himself any more or less relevant that he's been in the past. The only point of bone-headed sensationalist reporting like this is to try to sell more copies of the magazine. Next month they'll tell us the GPLv3 will contribute to global warming, and the following month that it will promote slavery.
It would be nice to have everything under compatible licenses, but it would also be nice to have all DRM proponents sent to PMITA prison.
Couldn't companies just continue using GPL 2 or use a different license completely?
s/`cat GPLv2`/`cat GPLv3`/
I'm tired of this idiot copy/pasting this same comment into every linux discussion.
Oh lawd I smell delicious copypasta.
Many of us have already moved away from Linux to BSD. Besides the many technical advantages of FreeBSD, the portability benefits of NetBSD, the extreme security of OpenBSD, and the massive scalability of DragonFly BSD, we don't have to deal with unreasonable licensing nonsense.
If somebody wants to take BSD code, modify it and not release those changes, then so be it. It doesn't hurt the rest of us, as we still have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD to use. Beyond that, such use may make somebody else better off. Thus, there's a net benefit overall. We lose nothing, yet others gain.
And I'd be very happy if Microsoft were to use more BSD code in their products. Doing so would result in a vast increase in the quality of their codebase. That, in turn, will result in fewer infected Windows systems that send terabytes of spam to my mail servers. The less spam my servers have to filter, the more money I save in bandwidth and processing costs. I may even be able to reduce the number of mail servers I have.
GPL 1 and 2 were developed far from the public eye. V3 is being debated and written under intense scrutiny. It would be hard to avoid the controversy being generated now.
The Linux kernel may not switch, but that will not doom V3, nor will it doom the FSF or Stallman. There is much that has happened since V2, and the attempts to address things like DRM and patents have and will continue to shed light on the ugly underbelly of modern software licensing. This, I think, is good.
"Free software" means something different now. It's not just being able to tweak a text editing program, or encourage community development and review. It's about who will control the millions of PCs in the world. The more that Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA continue to try to lock down the PC, turning it into nothing more than a delivery system for DRMed content, the more relevant the FSF becomes.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I don't mean this as flamebait but isn't RMS irrelevant already? Back when it needed a knowledgable geek champion who understood the situation at the time, RMS was great.
Since that time it appears that the real world operates on a different set of rules than RMS's "Free no matter what" and reality be damned.
Forgive me for not being so knowledgable but it does seem like RMS's ego is now driving the train.
After reading Forbes articles on SCO, it's clear that they aren't neutral. They are trying to influence their readers rather than report to them.
They are lobbyists.
We should just ignore them.
And as far as any possible splinter goes, this will separate the wheat from the chaff in both directions. It may be painful, but good will come of it.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I heard that GPLv3 kills puppies. Just what I heard. Seriously, if you're the FSF and you have a stated agenda that you would like to promote, wouldn't it be in your interest to tailor your fast and furious new license to complement the efforts of developers working on the most significant, most widely-used existing projects? I don't mean to downplay Stallman's or FSF's historical importance, but the future of free software is not with those players. It is with Linux, and Firefox, and so on--the software projects that Stallman and a ton of other people helped make possible.
Adoption of free software by non-nerds does not happen because of a Stallman speech about the software industry's problems, or because of GPLv3. Rather, it's the result of something as unassuming as a web browser that is more resilient to viruses and spyware than IE, and that provides a better browsing experience. That's really all that people care about.
I am not personally a fan of Stallman's--I think he's made his share of missteps that have hindered the free software movement. But overall, the net good that he and FSF have accomplished has already outweighed the bad. We have seen the open source movement burgeon and grow well beyond the ability of any one entity to kill it, hinder it, or even significantly influence it.
Does that mean we should dismiss GPLv3 as moot? No. Even if GPLv3 is 10 or even 20 years away from widespread adoption, or is just dismissed altogether as "aspirational", at least it's still out there. Out there to be used or out there to be used as a model for public licensing agreements yet to be drafted. There is no downside.
He's either lying or trolling; emulators are perfectly legal. You'd have to actually be using code from HP to be violating copyright.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Windows is utterly user-hostile, and that didn't seem to harm its takeup.
The only reason why Windows is ubiquitous and Linux is not, is that Windows comes pre-installed on PCs and Linux doesn't.
PC buyers were never offered a choice of operating systems, and they didn't make Windows the most common one because of its excellence: there was no option, and now it's just simply ubiquitous, despite being utter crap.
This has happened before. A while back I tried without success to convince Richard Stallman that continuing to promote a license (the GNU Free Documentation License or GFDL) :-)o n_License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
which was incompatible with the GPL was a bad thing.
See for example some reasons at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentati
http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
My particular interest was to use information from the GFDL-licensed Wikipedia in GPL programs. I'd go further and question the very reasons the GFDL was created in the first place -- just to make dead tree book publishers' lives easier? Where is the emphasis on freedom there?
I think it is easy for any technologist to underestimate community issues and then to see a license as a program for individual behavior instead of a constitution for a community. The GPL works. It has problems, sure, but it works well enough as a constitution for cooperation. More variants of licenses mainly just make more problems IMHO.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
guess what....that's te beauty of open source...if you don't like something you get to make your own.
No-one is holding a gun to you head to use this license if you don't like it...and if it is really as bad as people say then it will find little use anyway.
I am using code from HP in Nonpareil. It is code that was in the public domain. I have copyrighted the derived work.
The article, while biased, does get something right: Stallman IS a loose cannon, more interested in fanaticism and self-agrandizement than progress. A pox on all the developers who signed over their rights to this clown. A despot touting populism is still a despot.
If Stallman wsn't such an intellectual lightweight, he could resolve the conflicts between concerned entities.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
On the other hand, Stallman has a long history of being proven right. The general form this takes is that Stallman predicts that "If you give up the right to X, you will be screwed over by somebody who does Y." And then, inevitably, it happens. It bothers me that just because Stallman is committed to his ideals, people treat him like a joke, despite the fact that he's done us a hell of a lot of good.
The point is that there will always be what in game theory is known as habitual defectors, people who will take advantage of anything that the think helps them out, no matter what the cost to others. If you want to evaluate the risks of giving up rights to somebody, you have to assume the worst. The GPL has been remarkably successful at protecting us from these people. I don't how Linux could have had nearly the success it has with, say, a BSD license. There's nothing in Linux that BSD hasn't done, or couldn't have done.
Now, there are times when another license could make more sense. For example, one problem in the industry now is that FAT32 is the standard filesystem for removable devices such as USB flash devices. This is because it's the least common denominator, and until recently MS was willing to look the other way. But it's a bad filesystem, and now MS has been making noises about cracking down on it. What are the alternatives? Well, a GPL'd filesystem would probably not get a lot of support here, and licenses on things like ZFS are even more restrictive (plus it's rather new, and probably overkill). It seems like the BSD license would be the natural choice. UFS, maybe?
Richard Stallman's radicalism will be his undoing. This means great things for the BSD camp. Anyhow, the BSDs are superior to Linux in every way, shape, and form.
I find it hard to take Frobes seriously when they start out by misrepresenting the postion of the person they are talking about (Stallman).
"Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights--when he argues they should be giving it all away."
The only thing the empty suits at Forbes give a shit about is money. RMS has other objectives which very much do conflict with the aspirations of these opportunistic vultures, so of course they're going to cry about it. None of this changes the fact that RMS was the fulcrum that turned the technology industry completely sideways to the direction it was headed. Attempting to marginalize RMS as a future footnote says a lot more about Fortune's petulance than it does about RMS.
The next version of the GPL fills a niche that many feel needs to be filled. Copyright law entitles people to license their work however they see fit. Some people, such as myself, will very much see fit to license the code they write under the GPLv3. I could expound on the reasons I feel this is important, but quite frankly, those points have already been driven home ad infinitum, so I'm not going to waste my time. As always, if you don't like it, DON'T USE IT. That's your perogative. My perogative is to license my code however I damn well please.
Making opportunistic vultures who turn to rags like Forbes for wisdom unhappy is what RMS is all about. So in that respect, I would say the tone of this article brands RMS a smashing success. Long Live RMS!
C'mon, people! This is a Dan Lyons article. He's been writing anti-Linux FUD for years. Groklaw and /. have eviscerated this guy's credibility on this subject repeatedly (do a search, you'll see). Quoting him on this subject is like asking Bill Gates if he thinks Linux is going to beat Windows in the marketplace: you know the answer before you ask the question.
Here's part of the problem:
Stallman doesn't believe in compromising his ideals. His life's work is Free Software.
We can call him a weirdo, mad, an ass, but without his conviction we would all be locked into proprietary products. Unlike some things that happened because the world was ready for it (cell phones, computers), I don't believe that Free Software would exist if not for Stallman. That is, without him, I don't think another person would have dedicated his/her life to the cause.
Corporations don't compromise. Look at Microsoft's business tactics that were either outright illegal or bordering on the illegal. If they had their way we would not be allowed to write our own software, not be allowed to trade software with the original authors, not be allowed to listen to our own music. And this nightmare world is happening.
Sure, there has to be regulations, but not those imposed by corporations. Look at the radio broadcast spectrum, the automobile industry, etc.. for parallels.
So here is Richard Stallman. He's probably closer to the end of his years than to the beginning. His life's work is almost happening but Linux, for good or bad, is not at all what he envisioned. He's trying to fix it while he can. If I were in his position, I'd probably do the same thing (if only to be an ornery bastard).
Stallman is not compromising, but neither is Microsoft.
I care less about what RMS does. As an upcoming developer, if I am not happy with RMS' new GPL version, I simply continue to use version 2, which I am very happy about. That's the beauty of the GPL v.2. Am I wrong on this?
Sorry, I should have said "unless you're using copyrighted code without permission". My point was that emulators don't violate copyright, which is what the original poster seemed to be saying.
Forbes has had a chequered history at best when it comes to the computer industry,
not to mention Linux. However, there is a small grain of truth in their basic
premise, and in many ways, the Linux community continually shoots itself in the foot.
I've heard from various application writers who say they haven't got a clue when it
comes to "porting" to Linux, because there are so many variations in APIs (from their
standpoint) between the various distributions. I've been running SuSE for years, yet
I can't seem to install gnucash without getting into dependency hell where I seem to
need one more RPM after another ad nauseum/infinitum. I have a copy of gimp from a site
in Germany that's now out of date, but I can't do an 'rpm -e' on it without disrupting
the (circular) dependencies on a bunch of libraries that came with it, so it can't be
removed (or updated) without incredible frustration. I can't get an RPM of the latest
version of gimp because no one (particularly SuSE) can be bothered to package it up
to make it quickly, easily and *RELIABLY* installable *AND* removeable. And, other
distros don't seem to be any better - Debian is a nightmare to get WINE for. I can sort
of understand that they don't want to support a rapidly moving target, but it's not going
to settle down unless folks can install it, test it, report bugs on it, and try to fix it.
The politics around some of the apps are at the very least childish, and at worst, are
preventing me from doing what I'd really like to do. I'm just a hobbyist - i.e., my system
is NOT business-critical in the literal sense, but I really don't want to run Windows, and
haven't for a long time. But, when my dual Athlon 1800+ with 2GB of memory crashes gimp
repeatedly because I want to simply edit a picture, there's a major problem. Debian just
re-did all their CD writer software because of a pissing contest with the developer of the
package that I still use under SuSE 10.0. WHY ARE WE CONTINUING TO HAVE THESE SORTS OF PROBLEMS??
Yeah, I can sort of understand Linus' angst over GPLv3. No, I really don't care for some of
Stallman's antics. But those issues are the tip of the iceberg, and that iceberg is starting
to drift back towards the Pole whence it came, and seems to be freezing up and getting larger
as we speak. If we indeed are going to be serious about being a business solution that users
are willing to bet their business on (never mind how much they're paying for a distro or for
support), then we need to clean up our act NOW.
Forbes was a big supporter of a mouse that would dutifully spy on your system and tell its
boss what web sites you visited. I'm very disappointed that Steve let this happen in the
first place, and it saddens me that they're still very technically naive in many ways. But
it's going to be damned tough to straighten them out when our own Linux story is such a mess.
But the main point is essentially correct: Stallman is trying to aggressively expand his "freedom empire" with the GPL 3, and it could just bite him on the ass.
The article also insulting, inflammatory, and funny. Gotta love a good dustup.
As an open-source developer for 8 years building web and desktop apps, I am disgusted with GPLv3.
I am glad I never trusted the GPL to remain the meaning I intended for my creation and remove the upgrade clause making my code GPLv2 only.
The thought kept crossing my mind... what if someone like Microsoft created the official GPLv3 or v4 years from now.
My future open-source apps will probably be a modified FreeBSD or MIT style license.
Lyons is just raking for hits and /. delivers. This is such a number on Stallman I'm amazed that Forbes printed this muck. But it is even stranger that it gets on /. without any mention of the personal attack that this represents. It very much reminds me of the attack on PJ at Groklaw by Maureen O'Gara. This falls so far below a standard of journalism you would expect from a business journal. It seems very desperate. It also looks like free software really does scare the sh*t out of someone. The message is clear, sell your shares in IBM, HP, Novell, Redhat NOW and buy M$.
The 1990s called, they want their FUD back. Yes, we use apt-get because we want to but graphical installers have been around for ages now.
I don't see anyone that's claimed getting software that isn't packaged for the distro being easy. In fact, I don't think installing the software is all that difficult on either. Doing an upgrade of every application on the other hand... show me Windows do that, no instead I got 50 "auto-update" apps that all want to punch my firewall and make management annoying. And installing Linux is much easier if all the hardware is supported - no, you might not install Windows but more often than not users will need to have it reinstalled. Plus, the average install for the average poweruser goes like this:
Linux:
1. apt-get install [foo] (or click-equivalent, but I can't paste images in a comment)
Windows:
1. Find warez download (time consuming)
2. Download warez (crappy, unreliable P2P)
3. Install warez (pray you're not hosed)
4. Find crack (pray IE doesn't get hosed)
5. Install crack (pray you're not hosed)
There's a lot more of the "little things" that annoy me - for example, I recently installed azeureus on top of whatever dependencies debian gave me - turns out it was running on kaffe VM. The very nice thing about that, was that when checking files kaffe would spike to 100% CPU use and stay there using maybe 100x times as long, while sun's java would do it quite quickly at 5% CPU. Try swapping JVM, that's not very easy. Most people wouldn't have a clue or understand how the app depends on java anyway. That's probably the closest thing I've had to an install issue in ages.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anything currently licensed under any GPl, BSD, Apache license is still licensed. There is no mechanism to revoke a license.
If developers want to license their new stuff under the new license, so be it. My guess is that those who care enough will fork off. We have something like the same situation right now. There are distributions that are extremely 'pure' and those that are more 'practical'. I agree that the problem is not so serious that it will cause the death of Linux or open source.
Mod parent post down please -- FUD.
Just because HP doesn't seem to want to defend the copyright doesn't mean the files are in the public domain.
Following the logic from FSF, if you use the software to kill someone, that person will no longer be free to run the software (he is dead ).
Therefore, military use limits the freedom of potential users and is not in the spirit of the GPL.
It should also restrict use in prisons for the same reason.
It should forbid its use in ROM because the user can not replace the software.
It should forbid locking down the software with a phisical lock.
It should forbid farting near the equipment since noone will be able to get close to replace the software.
No, but the fact that they were published with no copyright notice back when that was a legal requirement in the US does mean that they are now in the public domain.
... then GNU can kick the Linux kernel to the curb.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No offense, but you just illustrated what the original poster was mocking by padding your list of Windows steps to make it look worse, when in reality, your average install on Windows is:
Windows
1.) Insert CD. Setup automatically begins.
And the fact remains that a lot of Linux packages require more manual configuration than their Windows counterparts.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I find it funny how companies struggle to make money by constantly trying to shift what should be in the unrestricted public domain to be something that is not. Companies deserve to protection when using public domained source and information ... they should be simply focused on quality of service delivery. If they become protectionist because they cannot provide a quality service/product ... then they deserve to collapse ... a new business model will arise from their ashes ...
Uh, most of the longest running servers online are running...BSD. Linux 2.6 has been a mish-mash of new code that should have been in a development line of kernels, and there have been prominent developers coming out and describing a spiraling trend of instability because of the new development model. It was even posted on Slashdot. Funny that you disregard that but selectively remember everyone else's FUD.
As for FreeBSD oopsing when you hotplug, never had it happen.
"Sufferin' succotash."
That "loonie" is doing his job by making sure that no exploitable code (blobs) are running at ring0. It's true the man isn't tactful, but he does do what needs to be done and for that I respect him. BTW, he's also a damn good engineer. The NetBSD folks lost one of their best assets when they kicked him out. But interpersonal relationships are a bitch.
This is the same Forbes that called all the tech jobs going overseas in the late 90's "pruning the dead wood." And treated SCO like their case actually had merit.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Honestly, I kinda think this is like the crusade for Network Neutrality... Just as the advocates of Network Neutrality areStallman and his ilk are too early to garner enough support to put it over the top.
Until the average person is feeling the squeeze from DRM (Which is starting... I'm having average people approaching me on it.), or having problems with using Vonage over their AT&T DSL connect... there is unlikely to be concensus to do something drastic like this.
As opposed to Slashdot, which never tries to influence its readers, ever. By the way, the iPod is lame and has less space than a nomad, people who "steal" GPL code are "thieves," and it's not theft to pirate music and not pay artists because the RIAA are bad guys who dare to protect their own copyrights using the legal system (The horror! The outrage!).
"Sufferin' succotash."
And you know these details about Richard Stallman's personality traits based on first-hand observations?
He's got to be hardcore and stick it to the man, like his hero Hugo Chavez.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Seems Daniel Lyons makes his living attacking Linux and GNU/FSF and others in the FOSS community. From the article:
Moderators, please do not mod this post. I'm not doing it for the points.
kill the 'Linux Revolution'?"
Then I thought, "That would be one very CUNNING STUNT man..."
(please refrain from Spoonerism...hehhe)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Just say no to license servers!!
The article is from a Daniel Lyons talking about "restricting business"
b allmer_cz_dl_0322mi...
4 sounds like he
though the real point of GPL v# seems to be is to keep free software from
restricting users (at the expense of shady business lock-in practices).
Lots of FUD about how this will hurt the (business) economy, etc. A
lot of the gist sounds like a push to privitize the previous work of
the community.
Also a bunch of exploitave tabloid-style character attacks on Stallman.
Seems Daniel uses this simliar muck raking style with other platforms:
http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/22/vista-microsoft-
Some people have written about the author:
http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/17
equally pisses off eveyone he reports about.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
"if you see a fork in the road, take it" - Yogi Berra
i think if this does not get resolved then Linus & Co, should copy the existing GNU tools and fork it, then Stallman & Co. better either copy a Linux kernel and fork it or start polishing Hurd...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I used to be a linux user and then a FBSD biggot and now an ubuntu Linux user again starting last year.
Linux was very stable at kernel 2.0 when Allen Cox was Linus's right hand man and the distro's did not include alpha quality bleeding edge products. FreeBSD was also very stable and I loved FFBSD 4.x. It had USB support long before Linux did and a certain quality was there that was absent in most linux distributions. However RedHat 7.x and the awefull mandrake ruined Linux expectation as a stable bug free operating system compared to Windows. I gave up and went to FreeBSD 4.2 and loved it! FreeBSD had the highest uptimes and could handle loads that Linux could not.
However the 1990's are over and FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x are terrible operating systems that are buggy under crazy locking schemes and spagehtti code. Most of hte core developers left and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu came with stable software and the kernel 2.6 is rock solid again like 2.0 was. Linux has caught up and beat FreeBSD.
Also my USB keyboard that worked under FBSD 4.x still does not work with the recent versions and no BSD hacker can figure it out.
FBSD is not the os it once was and neither is Linux.
http://saveie6.com/
When I read stuff like that, I recall a lot of the same things were said about Stallman and the GPL back when it was coming out. The GPL would drive companies away from open-source software, it was said, because the terms were too radical. Well, businesses didn't like the terms, it was true. But the main thing about the GPL businesses didn't like, the fact that it prevented them from taking GPL'd code and exploiting it for their own profit without letting others do the same, attracted developers in droves. And the result was software that was just too attractive for businesses to just ignore.
I'll go out on a limb and predict that GPLv3 will follow the same path that GPLv2 and GPLv1 did. And it won't include dying.
The author of the piece, Daniel Lyons, has a history of not exactly being friendly to Free Software and open source.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
Come on Mods. This post is not off topic. It is right on the money.
To take a really off topic, but simple, example; When they said; A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. They knew what them meant. Would it have been so hard to add a sentence? Either By this we mean a well regulated militia is one that is under state control or The intention of this is to prevent the state from usurping the rights of individuals, so this to means all citizens of good standing can bear arms.?
Makes a big difference, and not subject to later interpretation.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The question mark in the title is clearly a Cavuto, a type of punctuation used to make an inflammatory statement without actually being inflammatory. For further clarification, I would like to turn to Jon Stewart.
Join Tor today!
Ironically, TFA displays a blantant lack of respect for intellectual property and copyright. While it is busy smashing RMS for "demanding that the big tech outfits crack open their proprietary code whenever they inserted lines from [GNU/]Linux", it fails to realize that the FSF owns that code. Stallman and the FSF have just as much a right to enforce open source as Microsoft does to enforce closed source. Yet another case of confusing "free" and "freedom".
This author is completely ignorant of the issues surrounding Open Source/Free Software. He just realized all his favorite Fortune 500 companies were investing in a "socialist" operating system and let the FUD fly to make himself feel better.
but the article is really funny.
--------
But then, Richard Stallman rarely is pragmatic--and in some ways he is downright bizarre. He is corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating. His own Web site (www.stallman.org) says Stallman engages in what he calls "rhinophytophilia"--"nasal sex" (also his term) with flowers; he brags of offending a bunch of techies from Texas Instruments by plunging his schnoz into a bouquet at dinner and inviting them to do the same.
His site also boasts a recording of him singing--a capella and badly--his own anthem to free software. ("Hoarders can get piles of money / that is true, hackers, that is true. / But they cannot help their neighbors, that's not good, hackers, that's not gooood," he warbles, which culminates in polite applause from his followers.) He hasn't hacked much new code in a decade or more. Instead he travels the world to give speeches and pull publicity stunts, donning robes and a halo to appear as a character he calls "St. IGNUcius" and offer blessings to his followers. (GNU, coined in his first manifesto, is pronounced "Ga-NEW" and stands for "Gnu's Not Unix"; the central Linux license is known as the GNU license.)
And though he styles himself as a crusader for tech "freedom," Stallman labors mightily to control how others think, speak and act, arguing, in Orwellian doublespeak, that his rules are necessary for people to be "free." He won't speak to reporters unless they agree to call the operating system "GNU/Linux," not Linux. He urges his adherents to avoid such terms as "intellectual property" and touts "four freedoms" he has sworn to defend, numbering them 0, 1, 2 and 3. In June Stallman attempted to barge into the residence of the French prime minister to protest a copyright bill, then unrolled a petition in a Paris street while his adoring fans snapped photos.
-----
I got as far as this part:
M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge.
and realized that the author of TFA has no fucking clue what he's talking about. Stallman and the FSF are fine with people
charging money for software... The author clearly does not grok the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech."
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
If you've read other Dan Lyons articles on Linux or spoken to him about an article, you know what I mean.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
Ramen brother.
:-)
Arrrrrrr. (Just doing my bit to fight global warming
Ian Ameline
What are you, a moron? Oh wait, you're Overly Critical Guy. So yes.
By the way, the iPod is lame and has less space than a nomad
Umm. Don't care either way, so I'll just give you this one.
people who "steal" GPL code are "thieves,"
No, they're infringing copyright.
but it's not theft to pirate music and not pay artists
You're right. It's NOT THEFT. Once again, it's copyright infringement. Which is a tort, not a crime.
because the RIAA are bad guys who dare to protect their own copyrights using the legal system
I think the dislike of the RIAA has more to do with the fact that they're evil assholes who live parasitically off the artists, producing nothing themselves, and resort to to mafioso tactics to extort money from little old ladies who don't even have a computer.
But sure, your version totally makes sense, and perfectly represents the people you disagree with in a fair and intellectually honest way.
If they're made out of straw, at least.
The framers of the Constitution *did* think the Second Amendment was clear when written. And no one much questioned it for nearly 150 years: that's pretty darned good. 220 years of hindsight and court decisions have added an unbelievable amount of nuance and interpretation to what is simply the most carefully and expertly drafted political document in human history. How many other such documents have stayed around and had to be altered so little for such a long time? (Other than Germany's Rheinheitsgebot, that is.)
TANSTAAFL
is known for being a very unreasonable man in the sense that George Bernard Shaw used the word when he said, "The Reasonable man adapts to nature. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt nature to himself. Therefore it is only through the actions of unreasonable men that civilization advances." -Free For All http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_for_all.peter_wayn er/12.html
I really don't see any FUD here.
Fear?: Fear of what? The GPL software movement is splitting. This may be annoying, but hardly anything to fear.
Uncertainty?: There is little uncertainty, the split is now almost certain.
Doubt?: Doubt of Linux's survival? Anyone paying the slightest attention should have no doubt about that.
The article is filled with what I consider to be libelous comments about RMS: I don't think he is an anarchist, anti-corporate or against the sale of software. That sort of reckless disregard for the truth has no place in such a major publication, and I think Lyons should be fired.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
But the takehome message that non-techs will get from this conflict still looks like it will scare them away from linux, and back into ballmer's waiting arms. irony on a whole new level, imho.
This article is garbage. No one is forced to use the GPLv3. If people don't like it they won't use it. If they want to use it then they can't contribute code to the kernel unless they are willing to use the GPLv2 but that's about it. I really don't see this being a big issue. It looks like the FSF is trying to get agreement from a majority on the exact details of the GPLv3. If there isn't a huge consensus it could very well die amounting to absolutely no change from the way things are now.
The article is more of an attack on Stallman himself than the GPLv3. Take the following exceprt:
Exactly what does this have to do with the GPL or Linux in general?
Time makes more converts than reason
Richard Stallman may have his flaws, but being an "intellectual lightweight" is not one of them.
Any one of the large systems he was directly responsible for designing would make him world famous.
http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl-draft-2006-07-27.html
The reality is that businesses run Windows and Unix environments. Linux isn't the cheap panacea once touted to be. Sun isn't completely out of the game yet, and IBM still has AIX. Apple is also very much a player in the computing world. Sure you can download the latest version of Debian, but a corporate compute environment is more likely to use Red Hat or SuSE Enterprise.
Were I Apple or Sun, I'd be pushing my own version of Unix on the corporate world, letting them know they won't have GPLv3 worries to litigate in the future. Were I IBM, I'd make absolutely certain AIX is on every CIOs tongue.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
None of the symbols we use to communicate are immutable. ;)
The opinions of the dudes who wrote the Bill of Rights were not constant, either.
Why is this dark vision so resonant?
Because the increasingly complex legal system, far from being a means to the end of regulating society, is more a means unto itself.
One wonders what a graph against time of the legal costs spent on software by all companies would be. Frightening, I'd expect.
Your wish for an immortal law doesn't fit the legal business model and, ultimately, is just not quite real.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
First, language is not immutable, meanings change, grow, shrink. Second, a person's intent never extends to the full consequences of an issue. This is why we have a judicial system in the first place. If things were simple (i.e. there weren't fuzzy or complicated cases that defy easy categorization), we could simply write laws and everything would fall neatly into the buckets we'd carved out. Also, Stallman isn't a lawyer, although his intent is well and good, does he really understand what the consequences of his intent are? Should we have to shoe-horn previously decided case law into the framework of Stallman's intent?
Regardless of whether Stallman or other's think he's leading us into the bright new future, there's all this legacy baggage out in the real world that needs to be squared properly. And that's what judges are supposed to do.
There are lives at stake here!
Please don't waste bandwith restating jokes in a unfunny way.
No, but the fact that they were published with no copyright notice back when that was a legal requirement in the US does mean that they are now in the public domain.
Not necessarily if HP took steps to correct the omission. If they didn't then it becomes public domain 5 years after publication, at least in the US. Not sure what happens elsewhere.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is the reason I just love linux fags... the poster brings up legitimate issues with linux and gets modded troll.
that's ok, fags, keep your heads in the sand and i'll keep working with a real os.
No.
This article is Flamebait.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
There's an entire alternate ecosystem out there called BSD. Sure it appears to have fewer developers, but it isn't dead and isn't likely to go away anytime soon. If Linux does fork into v2 and v3 versions, it won't be any different from the various BSD flavors. Suppose all of the individual developers go with v3, and all of the commercial vendors go with v2. It won't break Red Hat; going forward they'll just only trade code with IBM and Novell and such like-minded people, just like the BSD vendors do today.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Given that applications being "ported" to Linux would imply that they are coming from a non-Unixish platform, ie. Windows, it is of no suprise to me that they are perplexed. I say this because it seems that the same gnucash and gnome and kde and konqueror run on Solaris, various BSD, etc. and the developers of these applications are certainly not perplexed. If you really intend to write a cross-platform application, you should drop all pretenses of thinking that a Win32 API app will magically port to an environment that was designed for "developer's pick of the day" when it comes to software tools.
I've been running SuSE for years, yet I can't seem to install gnucash without getting into dependency hell where I seem to need one more RPM after another ad nauseum/infinitum. I have a copy of gimp from a site in Germany that's now out of date, but I can't do an 'rpm -e' on it without disrupting the (circular) dependencies on a bunch of libraries that came with it, so it can't be removed (or updated) without incredible frustration.
In a packaged, proprietary software world, this would be the norm. I'm suprised that you expected otherwise. The fact that the dependencies are done so poorly is hardly a reflection on Linux and the applications it runs, as it is on the packager of the software (in this case, SuSE). Of course, this is not in any way unique to Linux-as-a-platform; take for instance, Hylafax. I have built and run a Hylafax install from the very first version that supported Mac OS X. After hunting down all of the libraries that it required (because OS X has its own API, and doesn't "natively" support programs like this) I can tell you that commercial software has its own issues, and they should not be confused with the community or the software it produces.
I can't get an RPM of the latest version of gimp because no one (particularly SuSE) can be bothered to package it up to make it quickly, easily and *RELIABLY* installable *AND* removeable. And, other distros don't seem to be any better - Debian is a nightmare to get WINE for. I can sort of understand that they don't want to support a rapidly moving target, but it's not going to settle down unless folks can install it, test it, report bugs on it, and try to fix it.
There's some more confusion here. Are we talking about Gimp, the RPM packaging method (and its issues), Debian, Debian's packaging issues (namely the glacial pace at which software versions are submitted), or Wine's version-number-of-the-hour approach to software releases?
You really want to see what this article is all about? Try this for size: Forbes sells a product, a magazine, to an audience, investors, that have large vested interests in publicly held companies, such as Microsoft, HP, IBM, etc. Suddenly, a competitor in the business market appears and threatens the status quo when it comes to who is making money. Do you take a gamble on what is seen as a newcomer (in business years, the Linux Community is just entering its teen years) and run a very good chance of alienating those people who make your livelyhood, or do you entrench yourself with the established players, because that is where your reader's money is - and therefore - your revenue? It's no suprise that Forbes has consistently published and promoted an agenda that seems incredibly nonsensical from a technical viewpoint, because they are doing what every other long-term established business is doing: protecting their customer base, and hence, their paychecks.
Forbes is publishing a hack job to scare readers and make money. This isn't about issues with "the community", it's about "damn the torpedos, I'm gonna get rich, and I don't care about how many people's necks I have to crush-under-boot to get there".
If you have b
Stallman is already irrelevant. I've been using Linux since it was a 30+ floppy disk distribution in the form of the original slackware. I don't plan to stop using Linux as a result of all the recent chest thumping from Richard. He was once a great programmer and has occsionally been a visionary, but I think this will be his swan song....Linux will live on as will many other wonderful products that live under the GNU umbrella. The fact that Richard wants people to move to a new license does not obligate ANYONE to do so.
In the other hand, there is Gentoo. Red Hat 8 threw me into deep dep hell, while I was trying to get Gnucash working. Out of anger, I switched to Gentoo. After three days compiling (I had a really lame machine back then -- insert Gentoo compile joke here), I got it working flawlessly.
Not that Gentoo is perfect, but dependency hell issues have been enormously reduced. Installation and removal of packages are quite painless, except when you need to downgrade software, as older versions may have disappeared from Gentoo mirrors but, hey, I'd better deal with that rather than dep hell....
Who ever said Linus needed to adopt the GPLv3? As far as I've seen, he has rejected the GPLv3. Linux can keep using GPLv2 if need be. And I see why not, we've just got hardware vendor's support. Why should we piss them off with a new license?
/me ducks and runs.
Besides, BSD licenses for the win. BSD style licenses benefit everyone involved. The GPL is a selfish license. If you write a library, and someone figures out a way to make money off of it, good for them. It sure doesn't affect the open source product at all, definitely not in sales. The GPL is an idealist license anyway.
They did indeed. However, word meanings and connotations change with time. Today many people think the "militia" is synonmyous with the National Guard (when in fact, the Guard has been part of the Army since 1933), and "well-regulated" means "operating under a large set of rules"; but at the time, it was clear to the authors that "militia" meant "every able-bodied man young enough to fight", and "well-regulated" meant "prepared and trained in military skills".
The meaning of "arms" has also changed: at the time, it was understood to mean the sort of weapon carried by an infantryman. Heavier weapons would be refered to as "cannon"; so Amendment II doesn't mean you have a right to a howitzer on your front lawn. But people arguing against the Second Amendment today often attempt a reductio ad absurdum which includes WMDs under "arms".
(Some people evidently also seem to think that "shall not be infringed" somehow means "can be limited by the government", but that's a linguisitic drift that's harder to account for.)
Anyway, point being that what is absolutely clear and precise to one audience, can still be interpreted differently by another (especially if the two group have different motivations).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Companies deserve to protection when using public domained source and information ... "
... then they deserve to collapse ... a new business model will arise from their ashes ..."
I assume there's a "no" in there somewere. The problem with your position and slashdot's as well is the assumption that the creator of works adds nothing to the process. It also ignores the simple fact that the "public domain" is both natural sources (information), as well as the efforts of creators over the centuries (art). Saying basically that one can't enjoy the fruits of one's labours (an idea that predates civilization) unless all creations are unique will have a chilling effect, AND it will waste great amounts of time, all to satisfy an untenable ideology.
"If they become protectionist because they cannot provide a quality service/product
I see the roots of Darwanism run deep, and hence unexamined. What makes you think there will be a replacement, or that it will be better than what came before? Aside from your faith in evolution that is?
but calling him "a strange footnote in the history of computing" is just idiotic.
Anyone who polarizes people to such a large degree, has generated so much passion, and has served as the point man of the free software movement deserves to be regarded as a towering figure in the history of computing. Whether GPL 3 succeeds or fails, Stallman has already left his mark. Again, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with him; he's no footnote.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Since when has Forbes ever had enough of a grasp of the open source world to have an opinion worth printing? Or a grasp of the software industry in general? How many people lost fortunes following Forbes' advice when the dot-com bubble burst?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
First up I'll state the obvious missed by most things on this topic - it is up to those pushing a new licence to convince developers that they should use the new licence, if we don't like it we don't have to use it.
About the article - it is also so badly misinformed that it propagates the falsehood that RMS wrote even a single line of linux (kamakaze attack on his own program)! The stupid prefix to adverise gnu worked, now RMS won't have to face those nasty comments in the staffroom anymore asking how hurd is going - people think he has been working on linux all this time. Nasty academic staffroom level politics has spilled into and poisoned the open source software environment, and an agrument about DRM laws in the USA that belongs in letters to representatives is being grafted on as a rider to the GPL which will only piss off people that already comply with v2 but do commercial things with software. A lot of this stuff is about ego, control, screeching at the converted and is just a waste of time - GPL v3 is still in draft form anyway. Linux is NOT a gnu project so silly little rules specificly to prevent nvidia binary drivers and other things unwelcome in a gnu project are not any of their business.
"Thou shalt not steal." is one thing.
"Thou shalt not steal anything which shall deprive an individual of his belongings, even if they are intangible." is different than "Thou shalt not steal tangible things. Things that can be duplicated without cost to the owner are fair game."
Two very different things, as we now know.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Um... in general, (speaking as a law student) we do. Right now, I'm sitting in the UIUC Law Library, looking at two hundred volumes that comprise legislative history going back to the early 1900s... and that's just abridged stuff. Law isn't code; two different people will look at the same law and interpret it two different ways, no matter how clearly it's written, no matter how much commentary is there. There will always be some point to fight over. Sorry to dissapoint you, but just like any other human writing, there's room for interpretation.
I think you are missing the point to some extent. Almost all of the 'legal language' that gets argued over was, when it was originally written, "present-day common usage". In 50 or 100 years, what you are suggesting would only lead to lawyers fighting over the interpretation of our "common day language" interpretation of laws that are another 100 years old. Just from your own example, I could see the meanings and usage of a word like 'duplicating' shift significantly in 50 years time.
I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to think twice about complaining about the specialized language of another profession. No one goes to work wanting to use obscure and hard to understand terms. Every odd usage and non intuitive phrase has a reason for existing and most of the time I would be willing to bet that it is a good reason.
The GPL v3 doesn't need to be used by anyone who doesn't want to use it. The FSF could come out with GPL v3 and everyone could simply go about thier business and continue to use v2, if they want to.
The fact is, however, that v3 clarifies many things that have been concerns in v2, since v2 is somewhat old and doesn't adequately address such issues as patents and DRM.
Also, Linus and crew are making a huge deal about making lots and lots of noise when Eben Moglen has asked them to PLEASE be a part of the process instead of simply complaining.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
You beat me to saying it. All this guy does is write articles down on Linux, free software etc. Has been doing it for years.
Why would allowing a government controlled militia be in the Bill of Rights? First of all, the Bill of Rights is there to ensure the people's rights, not the governments functions. Second of all, why would a government deny itself an army? As far as I'm aware, the founders hadn't had problems with Britain being extremely pacifistic.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Call me nuts, but I think that a magazine like Forbes has a bit better perspective than zealot. Besides, Forbes doesn't have anything to lose. This is what they do. The analyze companies.
Even if you're not infringing any copyrights, it seems entirely likely that you could be infringing HP patents for the look of its devices or trademarks for the same. IANAL, so do your own research (assuming you care) but it may be something to consider.
Heh, why not mandate that laws be expressed in both the native tongue, and, latin, or esperanto, plus vernacular of the native toungue. Just to be clear, for all time.
I suspect folks, by and large, like things not to be "for all time".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I can use the GPLv2 forever and its legal There is no Linux penalty as implied by the article by sticking with GPLv2.. Forbes, hire some better writers with some freaking brains
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
We could then call it GNUGNUGPL-NUv1.0beta.
The acronym would stand for GNUGNUGPL's Not Unix GNU GPL. (Not Unix)beta
Advantages:
But while I tend to prefer the GPL myself it is by now means the only open source license. BSD style licensing could have served as a template too (or an inspiration for a GPL-like license). It *is* thanks to Stallman that the GPL got the foothold it did (that and the litigation BSD was in while Linux was gaining mind-share).
Quack, quack.
How is Theo de Raadt more of a loonie than GNU project founder Richard Stallman?
GPLv2 contains the following language in paragraph 9:
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
This provision gives the option of deciding whether to follow V2 or V3 to the person making a copy of V2 code, not to the author.
There is a serious ambiguity - if that person adds or changes some of the code, can that person convert the entire module to V3 or is the module now fragmented? And if the latter, how is anyone supposed to keep track of what statement of code is under what license?
Personally I have abandoned publishing code under the GPL - I now use the less restrictive, non-viral MIT/BSD style licenses.
There is another situation that few have discussed - The rules of copyright in the US are defined by statutes enacted by, and changable by, Congress.
There is a chance that Congress could amend the US copyright law to deny the right of enforcement to anyone who has made only a partial or small contribution to the totality of the work or if that contribution has been subject to several intervening layers of further contributions. (It would be a bear to define these things, but the Congress critters would be getting a lot of help from the IP and non GPL software industry.)
Early on in the lawsuit, Daniel Lyons writing for Forbes heavily backed SCO against IBM, however like SCO they cited no evidence to back up the claim that Linux developers stole code from Unix and put it into Linux. They simply assumed that since the people behind the SCO suit were successful with lawsuits in the past they would be successful again.
And of course like many of us called it back in 2003, SCO's stock first skyrocketed on the hype from articles like Forbes' and then plummeted as it has become public knowledge that their case is completely without merit. Naturally those people in on the action early cashed out early and big, leaving the pointy hairs' who listened to Forbes holding the bag. So they may well have had some level of credibility in 2003, but the zealots wearing the blinders at Forbes called it wrong, and they didn't miss by a hair, they missed by a mile.
Because it allows the *STATES* to have their own armies, just in case they need to defend themselves from external threats, including those from other states or the federal government itself.
It essence, it means the states all have the right to have their national guards and state militias, and that Congress can't revoke that right, in the hopes of avoiding the sort of situation the colonies found themselves in relative to Great Britain.
There is absolutely no way whatsoever the FF's intended it to mean that every American has an inalienable right to own any weapon they want whatsoever without limit.
All I am saying, is that when I write (usually about techie stuff), I try to write clearly, without taking for granted the audience. I assume my docs will be read by the corporate types who pay the bills, and the geek admin who will install and run my code. I define my terms, even if they are painfully obvious (to me) at the time. You need some perspective that some reader down the road may not have the same background as you or the same assumptions. (Heh, *that* reader might be myself three years from now.)
Why can't law be the same? I guess it boils down to more docs are better. How about writing the "full manual" AND a "quick start", and a "for dummies", and ???, etc. As much as it takes, depending on how important the item your are writing about is. The GPLV3 might be worth more words. I have hundreds of GB of storage, if not TB. A few more words won't hurt me, but might make my legal bills smaller later.
I know "the law" is all about dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s, but if you do the legalese first, then preface multiple, redundant, intended-to-clarify, clauses, how does that detract from the primary goal?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Consider the purely hypothetical clause: 'This software cannot be used in the production or use of closed-source software.'
I've considered it, and I like that idea. Doesn't that basically match the intent of the GPL anyway? I'd think that's a lot more clear and harder to dispute than the current GPL- throwing that in there would be quite clear, wouldn't it? What would that rule out that the current GPL doesn't?
Care about privacy? Read this!
Let's see:
Ten commandments?
I'm not religious, but...
"Thou shalt not murder"
Is pretty clear to me. Although apparently it wasn't to Christianity. Then again this wasn't an issue of not being clear rather than the people this is and was addressed to, putting their fingers in their ears and singing "LA LA LA LA LA LA I can't hear you LA LA LA!!"...
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Uhmm, as I understand it, numerous developers signed over the rights to the FSF, and that was also mentioned in the article. If the developers no longer have the right to administer the copyright copyright on their own creations, shame on them! If I'm wrong, shame on me.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
"...my chainsaw is incompatible with my text editor."
You should've used emacs.
News to me.
Daniel Lyons is a known propagator of FUD. He just writes up stories that have the facts wrong all the time. I'm somewhat surprised slashdot even gave this piece of non-news any attention. It must be a slow day today.
There is a Linux revolution? Last I checked, Linus is still in control, as much as ever anyway, and Alan Cox stepped down peacefully, without any coercion :]
Joking aside, let's all keep in mind who is publishing this garbage. Do you think the readers of Forbes are, just maybe, on the capitalist, monetize everything, even if you can't possibly hold an exclusive license side of the debate?
Ok, Fine. What counts as arms? a .22 pistol? A tank? A basement full of C-4? An F16? and what counts as a citizen of good standing? Someone who hasn't been convicted of a felony? Someone who has no criminal record? Does this include traffic violations? Even your clarifications must be further clarified. It's a never ending cycle that can never be fully codified.
Even if you personally are not altruistic in your goals, that does not mean everyone else must be similarly as self-centered and pessimistic.
That's my point, that's why you can't equate MicroSoft with RMS. Whether RMS gets some personal satisfaction from getting to trumpet and strut is largely immaterial, if it doesn't contravene what he represents: empowering all to become aware of and exercise their freedom, which is a selfless perspective. It's a perspective of inclusion originating from love.
I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou, high-and-mighty, or flakey. I just see a lot of injustice and deceit in this world, and believe movements like the FSF are not selfish like what they're advocating against, but rather thinking about the good of everyone.
Don't you see that?
You REALLY misunderstand him. He's not espousing those points, or agreeing with or opposing them. He's saying that those are examples of times that Slashdot has pushed an organizational opinion in a summary. And it's true. Slashdot is biased towards GNU/Linux/OSS, and against copyright. It's also owned by VA Software, so that should be no surprise. But I think the issue here that no one is addressing is that Forbes shouldn't be being compared to Slashdot. Slashdot is run by 4-5 guys, and is aimed at a small niche ("Nerds"). Forbes is supposedly the top business magazine. Big difference is that Forbes shouldn't have the biases Slashdot can get away with.
To take a really off topic, but simple, example; When they said; A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. They knew what them meant. Would it have been so hard to add a sentence? [etc., etc.]
If you are familiar with the history, it's obvious that, at the time, it very clearly referred to an individual right to bear arms.
That's what instigated the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and hence sparked the American Revolution. The British soldiers based in Boston went to collect caches of weapons from known or suspected agitators in the countryside. The British-American colonists felt their rights were violated, and it led to open combat, a fighting retreat, and the colonists successfully besieged Boston. All because the government wanted to collect weapons from citizens.
The problem is that, when man-portable automatic weapons were developed, the Constitution was not changed. Practically everyone recognizes that, if private individuals are allowed to own fully-automatic AK47s, there will be serious problems enforcing civil order. They were made illegal some time around 1900, but no one could be bothered with amending the Constitution to make such a law possible. So ever since that time, we have been subjected to the bizarre construction of 'oh yeah, it refers to ownership by militas, not to private ownership'. This only led to still more bizarre things like the creation of the 'Michigan Militia'.
Anyway, the problem is not that the second amendment is unclear. It's that it was outdated by late 19th-century technology, and we have been suffering under legal kludges ever since. All that we need is to pass a new amendment to say "people generally have a right to own handguns and rifles, but deadlier things can be prohibited".
But considering the trouble Congress has with even considering any modification at all (liberal or conservative) to Social Security, my hopes are not high.
Bzzz, WRONG! Why is it that when people discuss the Bill of Rights, "the people" is interpreted correctly in all of them except the 2nd amendment? Did the meaning of "the people" somehow change between 1 and 2 and then back again for all the rest? No, it didn't. So stop reinterpreting it to fit your dream. "The right of the people, to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" The people means the citizens, not the states. This is true for every single amendment, with no exceptions.
I'll give ya one thing. The FF's never intended people to be able to own nukes, but they sure never intended the kind of draconian gun laws some places have either. Criminals break laws, that's why they're called criminals and not law abiding citizens.
"Don't you see that?"
I don't. I see people condemning anyone who writes "non-free" software as evil. I see very little "love" on the part of RMS or any hard-core "free" software advocate. It's all about hate IMHO. Hating MS, hating anyone who dares to disagree. I think it's more motivated by self-rightiouness than concern for your fellow man. What sort of charity work does the average "free" software advocate do that has no anti-something involved in it?
Given their lead, they had visions that they owned aviation through patents. They had the idea that flight was going to be bigger than anyone could imagine, but their idea was of themselves being a Microsoft rather than the aviation industry being Open Source. They made some money from it, but they didn't realize their dream of becoming personally rich beyond imagining. An engine maker called Curtis-Wright had their swan song in the form of the TurboCompound radial engine that powered the DC-7, Lockheed Constellation, P-2 Neptune (did they have one in the Skyraider?). But in the age of Boeing and Airbus, they are a historical footnote.
Fucking parasites both. Redhat sucks gargantuan moosedick and Novell is a virus.
Free software is free. Only a fool would pay.
Will Stallman Kill the "Linux Revolution?"
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Sure, you can sign over your copyright to the FSF, and people even have. You could also sign your copyright over to your employer or your mother. But nothing about the GPL requires you to reassign it to anyone. The original poster sounded like he might not realize that.
I have yet to understand all of this controversy around GPLv3 and the Linux kernel. Things just don't add up.
The Linux kernel is strictly licensed under the GPLv2, without the "or any later version" suffix appended to it. And since the copyright on every piece of code in the kernel is owned by its respective contributors (a counterexample of this is Gentoo, which makes all of its devs with CVS/SVN accounts sign a legal contract stipulating that all of their work is owned by the Gentoo Foundation), switching the kernel to GPLv3 is technically impossible because it would require ALL contributors (possibly thousands, spread over a decade) to give their approval.
Therefore, debating on whether the kernel should upgrade to v3 or not is a waste of time, because even if Linux and co. were to agree with v3, IT STILL WOULDN'T BE LEGALLY POSSIBLE TO SWITCH TO v3. The kernel is permanently stuck to GPLv2, and everyone should accept this now.
Even if GPLv2 and GPLv3 were to be incompatible with each other, it only means GPLv3 can't be used in new code entering the kernel. But that doesn't matter, in fact it would make things simpler.
Personally I think the GPLv3 is great, but it won't affect the Linux kernel, end of story.
"A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
...I am with the Scruffy Crazy.
RMS
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
My personal opinion is that Richard Stallman's relevance began to decrease
as soon as he stopped programming. I think that he is a first class programmer
but that he is an abject failure as a policy maker.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
> I mean, if it is from the original author of the clause in question, why
> would it not have standing, even if clearly different from the exacting
> legalese
Because of the requirement of legal certainty.
Say you have a license agreement (or contract). Both parties read the terms and agree to it. All is happy. Now one day the drafter of the agreement (who isn't one of the parties) comes up and says "nevermind what I wrote, I actually meant *this*!". If this was accepted, then the parties are now bound by terms that they didn't agree to.
Note that (AFAIK) in common law, the court will put some weight on the intention of the parties of the agreement or contract. But this is different from the case where the contract or agreement or license (eg. GPL) was drafted by a third party (eg. RMS). RMS's intentions are not relevant (unless, of course, the parties had RMS's personal interpretations in mind when agreeing to the terms, then maybe that would be relevant)
Anyway, the bottom line is: the law expects you to read and (argh) understand the legalese, and it doesn't expect you to find out what the drafters of the document have to say about their intentions. What you agree to is the terms expressed on the document, not the drafter's intentions. In fact, the drafter's intentions are probably even more irrelevant than the parties not involved in the drafting: (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_preferendum )
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Another disclaimer: the above is a very rough approximation of the law. It is not accurate by any means.
Another disclaimer: I live in a common law jurisdiction, but the law in the US and my jurisdiction can vary.
Don't quote me on this.
An interesting article, but it shows a remarkable lack of knowledge, both on the part of the author and on the part of some of the people that he quoted. He seems to think that if you distribute software under the GPL, that it gives Stallman control of said software, or that it gives Stallman a right to sue people who (mis)use the software. That simply isn't true. The copyright owner (i.e. the person(s) or company that actually wrote the software) controlls it, and is responsible for suing those who infringe on the GPL.
If said companies broke the terms of the GPL, then they're in the wrong, aren't they? I mean, hey, if I broke the terms of the license for, say, MS Windows and Microsoft found out about it, they'd be all over me like stink on you-know-what. But when the big corporations are called on *their* (alleged) copyright violations, suddenly it's Stallman that's in the wrong.
And then there's the fact that it goes on paragraph-after-paragraph describing Stallman in the most unflattering terms. I mean, hey, Stallman is no saint, and he is a bit bizarre, but what does that have to do with the GPL? What does hair in soup have to do with copyright law? What does bad singing have to do with finance? Forbes *is* a finance magazine and not a celebrity trash rag, right?
Ah, I see. Daniel Lyons said bad things about Richard Stallman, so Stallman snubbed Lyons, so Lyons is in a snit. Grow up, guys.
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber" -- Plato
Need I say more?
Legal documents these days are long enough to begin with. You must have seen how long EULA's can be. Now, do you REALLY want to go through, not only one, but MULTIPLE documents of even greater length?
No thanks.
Didn't the grandparent poster say: "Right now, I'm sitting in the UIUC Law Library, looking at two hundred volumes that comprise legislative history going back to the early 1900s... and that's just abridged stuff." Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover everything to the point of absolute clarity. So do you want to have a few more hundred volumes of these stuff? Who's going to read through all of them?
Besides, the real world is a lot more illogical than your computer is. There will *always* be grey areas which are impossible to resolve. A computer logically comprises discrete bits. The real world is for all practical purposes a continuum.
Don't quote me on this.
Stallman's vision of Free Software is inherently *impossible* without copyright. Without copyrights, anyone could take any code, copy it, modify it, distribute/sell the modifications, and refuse to release the modified source code.
Unless you can restrict what people can do with your source code (i.e. restrict their freedom), there's no way to keep software Free. Ironic, neh?
I know, traditions and all, but after all, legal rulings are often called "opinions". Why does there need to be "interpretation"? When you make a law (or write a license), would it be so hard to tag a sentence or two in plain vernacular about the "intent"? Why wouldn't that have any weight, legally? I mean, if it is from the original author of the clause in question, why would it not have standing, even if clearly different from the exacting legalese? Seems like we have the author of GPLV3 explaining himself already! Couldn't the intent be part of the license?
To take a really off topic, but simple, example; When they said; A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. They knew what them meant. Would it have been so hard to add a sentence? Either By this we mean a well regulated militia is one that is under state control or The intention of this is to prevent the state from usurping the rights of individuals, so this to means all citizens of good standing can bear arms.?
Makes a big difference, and not subject to later interpretation.
In writing a philosophical essay, students are often advised to use as plain and simple English as possible to explain the claim that they are making, and to restate it several times in different ways, and include examples, to make sure that no reader is going to misunderstand them. I heard a good guideline the other week summarizing this: assume that your reader is "stupid, lazy, and mean". "Stupid" in that that they're not going to get your point very easily and need everything spelled out for them, "lazy" in that they're not going to to go to the effort of trying to understand what you mean and need everything spelled out for them, and "mean" in that they'll probably interpret what you say in the most negative way possible, so they need the actual intention of your point clearly spelled out for them.
It seems to me that, like you're saying, this would be a very good principle to apply to laws. Say what you're going to say - "P". Then say it, in a different way, "By P, we mean Q". Then say what you just said - "That is to say, R; or in other words, S." Give examples: "For example, this law prohibits X, Y, and Z; this law does not prohibit A, B, and C." And of course be clear that those are only examples and not the full extent of the law.
Someone else who responded to you already said that the symbols we use now to convey meaning (our language) do not retain the same meaning across generations. But it seems to me that you've got a good point: that by stating something in as many ways as possible, you're sort of giving several points of reference, to make sure that future generations understand that "P" meant the same thing as "Q" when we wrote this, so if what "P" means to you kids in the future isn't the same as what "Q" means to you, you're misunderstanding us somehow.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
what the hell is the point of the copyright? and lisncences/patents..
so other monkeys wont copy another monkeys work? um ever heard of "monkey see monkey do?", your fucking up evolution!
"220 years of hindsight and court decisions have added an unbelievable amount of nuance and interpretation to what is simply the most carefully and expertly drafted political document in human history."
Gush much?
You may want to read this.
"How many other such documents have stayed around and had to be altered so little for such a long time? "
The Bible.
If its Forbes, its a waste of your time. That publication has got to be one of the worst. Its like idiots writing for idiots.
And anyone who uses Grok in a sentence in the English language is oblivious to the real world where people see Stallman as a fat, loud-mouth hippy with the personality of Abimael Guzman of Sendero Luminoso and the charm of Saddam Hussein. In the real world, where people use the word "understand" and not "grok" because they don't use a, for them, archaic command line interface, looks and behaviour count for something.
Some landowners did own cannon. Standing armies were prohibited, so good citizens agreed they each had a duty to be prepared to defend their state. And having just founded a country through violent revolution against tyranny, the last thing they wanted was a government with enough of an advantage over private citizens that it could suppress another revolution!
"Thou shalt not steal." is one thing.
"Thou shalt not steal anything which shall deprive an individual of his belongings, even if they are intangible." is different than "Thou shalt not steal tangible things. Things that can be duplicated without cost to the owner are fair game."
Two very different things, as we now know.
Yeah... thing is, the tablets purported to have been delivered to Moses were written in Hebrew, and were badly translated. The commandment referred to kidnapping into slavery, not taking your neighbours crockpot.
Heh... I don't know if that makes your example bad, or better
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"Not so simple. Your version of freedom seems to be anarchy. BSD lets bullies bully, and does nothing to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons"
The problem is is that you can't apply "Tragedy of the Commons" to digital goods. Digital goods aren't finite and the ToTC is about finite goods.
"GPL tries to give everyone more freedom by restricting the freedom of the slick and sharp to take freedoms away from the less sophisticated."
With the implication that the GPL will always be able to cover those "loopholes". There's also legal loopholes that the GPL allows for those who wish to keep the code away from the "less sophisticated" while allowing some of the benefits of the code. The one Nvidia has chosen is one (by association). The "web services" is another (by reflection), and the last is simply by distributing the code within an organization only (by exclusion).
Isn't GPL3 addressing this specific problem? At least, attempting to? I seem to recall in the india speech that rms/moglen were explaining that the GFDL3 would be compatible with GPL3, due to the 'extendability'/'additional terms' section7? I could be entirely wrong here but that's what I got out of it.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
+5 Interesting to an unsubstantiated AC troll?
If you had the upgrade clause (supposing you actually wrote some apps and this is not trolling), you can still stay GPLv2 as long as you like. And Microsoft, Sauron or Darth Vader cannot do that, as the clause reads:
To those who modded this up: what about modding up stuff that actually contributes to the debate, instead of rabid rants? This AC simply babbles "Meh, I do not like it, will not use it" with no substantiation he has ever programmed anything.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Face it: Linux is the new Hurd. Nothing has happened to it in years. How different is the latest "Stinky Skunk" Ubuntu different from a year 2000 Mandrake ?
Because your "plain language" is plain to you but not to everyone else, and especailly not to an determined lawyer.
I live in Hong Kong, where your "intent" idea has sadly been put into effect. When Hong Kong was handed back by Britain to China in 1997 the laws of Hong Kong were determined by the "Basic Law", in effect a constitution, as enacted by the PRC after negotiation with the UK. However, some years later when the governement wanted to enact laws that went against the "obvious" interpretation of the Basic Law (relating to elections mostly), the rulings of Hong Kong's High Court were overridden by the government by appealing to the "intent" of the laws, by asking members of the committee that had drafted them what they had been thinking about. Thus the government is able to retrospectively change the effect of laws without even having to pass legislation.
So as much as we all hate lawyers, having judicial oversight that follows the strict letter of the law, and not its "intent", is a much more democratic system. If governments want to change laws, they can make new ones and let the legislators openly argue and vote on them.
"Thou shalt not murder" Is pretty clear to me.
It is, is it? Define murder exactly? The fine line between murder and self-defence is different from country to country, and even then the right smooth-talking lawyer can put one's actions just on the other side of the line. What about using lethal force to defend your children? Does that make one a murderer, a hero or both?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Both you and grandparent miss the genious of the Constitution. The reason it hasn't required more upkeep in the past 200+ years is /because/ it is so vague. Specificity results in obsolescence.
Consider if one of the powers granted to Congress was, "The ability to build roads, by which we mean paths of no more than 20 feet wide for the use of wagons, horses, and pedestrian traffic." Yeah, THAT would have stayed the test of time.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Whatever else the guy said:
If GPL v2 and 3 are incompatible, this will cause serious trouble.
F.Ex, possible splintering of GNU/Linux.
Windoz will inherit the world...
-- Happy dreams, hackers
With the history that Forbes has on predicting matters related to Free Software, I think we've just had two things that aren't going to happen identified for us. Relax everyone, the sirens have become quiet again.
Dear Danny,
Your mom will kill the "Linux Revolution."
Well, this gem is included:
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
I'm pretty sure they didn't mean $20 the way you and I mean $20.
We need to draft laws in a logic language. I propose a LISP dialect.
Part of the strength of the GPL is that is does just that: It contains over 400 words of preamble.
http://outcampaign.org/
No, that's what copyright law is for.
DRM is about control, and vendor lock-in. You're at the mercy of whomever makes the DRM. They might go under, or maybe they'll decide you shouldn't have rights to the song, software or movie.
This seems like FUD, just look at the word choice.
"forbidden" "barred from suing over alleged patent infringements"
"radical" "tear it apart" "lesser-known programmer--infamously eccentric" "startling amount of control" "anticorporate crusader" "anarchist"
"waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" utopian anticapitalist" bent
"impose new restrictions any other tech firm that distributes software using even a single line of Linux code"
It's just sensationlist.
Linux:
1. apt-get install [foo]
2. Wait for [foo] to download.
3. Configure [foo], if necessary
Windows:
1. Buy the program on a CD/DVD
2. Wait for CD/DVD to arrive
3. Insert CD and click next a bunch of times.
Better?
The other possibility is that the extra clauses do have legal force. So you run into the problem of inconsistency and different interpretations all over again, only with more choices to start from.
The best step would be to simplify the laws so much that the background noise goes away (says someone from a country that produces 70% of all the tax law interpretation literature in the world...).
Stephan
That's because the definition of the word "murder" is unclear.
It's not considered murder to kill a man who's fighting for the opposition when you're at war (unless he's surrendered and should be taken as a PoW).
It's not necessarily murder to kill a man who's coming at you with a weapon. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder.
It's not murder if you're not mentally fit to judge what is and isn't acceptable (well actually it is, but you won't receive the same kind of punishment in most civilised countries).
...I told you so? ;-) Maybe I should leave that for when Stallman actually *does* become irrelevant, rather than for stories like this which merely speculate about it.
Yes, the man did do some good things...it isn't that I'm not acknowledging that. I can't prove or disprove that nobody else would have come up with the idea of a FOSS license without him.
The bottom line now however is that as this article says, Stallman's radicalism is now threatening to destroy all of the good that he has created in the past...People also say he never changes, but personally I believe he *has* changed. He's already sold out, but not in the way this article's author thinks.
He's sold out in the sense that it's purely about power for him now...it's about being a cult leader. It's about having followers who worship him and follow his every decree.
If I thought he was still doing things for the right reasons, I'd venerate him myself. I believe that there was a time when he genuinely did care about the wellbeing of people other than himself...but that that time has long since passed.
For the sake of FOSS in general, he now must, as the article says, be routed around.
Huh? When did that change? It's always said "Thou shalt not kill" in my bible.
I think that one works along the lines of "They're not people since they don't worship God, so it's not murder". Not that it's an excuse.
Even if you assume $20 was a lot of money back then, I don't see it as being a bad thing that the currency has devalued to the point that trial by jury is extended to everyone for every case triable under common law.
Let me see ... how many Ecumenical Councils were there? So the Nicene Council around 325 - oh, wait, the Nicene Creed was amended a little at the later Constinopolitan Council ... so it has only been unchanged in the last 1500 years. Besides the creed itself, they passed a whole lot of provisions of canon law. Then there were the provisions of the other councils, and the later Orthodox and Catholic Councils that still have force as canon law. The laws of England include provisions going back to the reign of Edward III (1300s) that are still in force (or were until recently). Hmmm Magna Carta - now there is a document to make your Constitution look like a juvenile.
History wasn't invented in America. Some places have been around longer, and have a longer tradition of unchanged principles. Jewish law goes back, in some matters, over 3,000 years. America is just a Johnny-come-lately in the world of legal history.
I am anarch of all I survey.
It doesn't specify humans. Some of us consider killing all animals to be murder. But where to I draw my line ? Bacteria, a wild dog attacking me, a mosquito ?
3 3_en_6.htm#mdiv63
Specificity for such things is always hard to pin down.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/Ukpga_199400
Here the state tries to define rave music in order to outlaw it
63.--(1) This section applies to a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and is such as, by reason of its loudness and duration and the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality; and for this purpose--
(a) such a gathering continues during intermissions in the music and, where the gathering extends over several days, throughout the period during which amplified music is played at night (with or without intermissions); and
(b) "music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Well, with all the DRM getting forced down our throats everywhere commercially it is important that Open Source software (including OS) takes a stand and say that DRM takes away freedom of use and fair use and thus it has no place in Open Source. In other words, all software enforcing DRM should be banned from all Open Source. On the other hand, software circumventing or breaking DRM is a natural part of Open Source and should have a natural place in all distributions.
Sure, stupid media monopoly laws (DMCA etc.) may deem this illegal but I'm sure there are places where such laws don't exist and Open Source will therefore have to be stored and distributed from such locations.
When everybody can obtain tools to circumvent/break DRM easily, both the law and the DRM systems themselves will be rendered obsolete, and our mission in that field is complete.
"Do you think the language in the Second Amendment is clear enough? You know, about the right to bear arms?"
"Of course it's clear! Every American has the right to hang a pair of bear arms on their wall! How could that possibly be misconstrued?"
> "Thou shalt not murder"
> Is pretty clear to me.
It's "thou shalt not kill", though.
You should have some magic disk there, because for me Windows installing (I am support/sysadmin for 10 years and I know what I talking about) NEVER have been "Insert CD, Setup automatically begins".
You surerly never have installed more than few Windows boxes. And no, Linux packages don't requires manual configuration. I have installed about 5 Ubuntus last months and I have NEVER touched config files. And I am quite good in console.
Nice troll.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The Wright Brothers were first in flight excepting some spurious claims.
Sorry, I'm being pedantic as I know what you mean, but the hot air balloon was around for a little while before the Wright brothers first flew.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
GPL version 3 is in draft-mode, revision number 2. The process of the draft is an open one, where they accept comments from anyone over the internet.
You then have two camps:
1) Those who contribute and give constructive criticism / suggestions for further development of this _still unfinished license_. I among others have done that. You are welcome to too.
2) Those who want to kill off the license before it even has been given birth yet. Sorry folks, there is no license to kill yet, it's still in the drafting stages.
Sorry, after this article, another category comes up:
3) Those who just engage in useless and clueless ad hominem attacks because of their bruised ego.
Amusing how some people make fools out of themselves in public.
"thou shall not KILL".
This means that Thou Shall Not Kill, even in self-defense or in the defense of others. Period. If others would kill you or your brother, you let them sin, but you do NOT sin yourself. Got it?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
but I clicked the wrong button.
Continuing...
No exceptions are made for self-defense, war, euthanasia, suicide, or any other lame excuse. Thou Shall Not Kill and period.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
by definition. The commandment is "thou shall not steal" and not "thou shall not sing the song you heard yesterday at the pub" nor "thou shall not make a digital copy of the song you heard yesterday at the pub". There is NO Intellectual Property. And I am going to patent posting to /. saying that there is no intellectual property, but I am offering a limited-time R$ 1000 a-pop license.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It has never changed. The translations from the original Hebrew are slightly different. Exodus 20:13 in various translations:
NIV: "You shall not murder.KJV: Thou shalt not kill.
The Message: No murder.
NKJV: "You shall not murder.
It seems as though the most widely agreed upon translation from the original Hebrew is "murder." Despite the various translations, I don't think anyone has ever misunderstood this or any of the other Commandments.
huh? Robert Picardo Generations?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It was always that way. Killing is perfectly justified for a large variety of reasons in the Torah. Capital punishment is common, there are fairly complex rules for retribution, and plenty of times G-d Himself says "go out and win a glorious victory" if you read the assorted Prophets and Writings. If all killing were outlawed, there'd be a heck of a lot of contradiction here.
Murder, though, is unjustified killing. It breaks one of the Ten Commandments to pick a child at random and bash his head in. It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
I prefer to reading which doesn't cause G-d to be commanding His people to break the Ten Commandments, personally.
For the nitpickers:
The Hebrew word in question is 'ratzach' (which is conjugated to tirtzach in the text; Exodus XX, 13). Modern usage (according to my dictionary) clearly indicates murder as the first definition, and 'kill' as secondary. There is another verb 'harag' which can also mean 'kill', unfortunately I'm not as up on my Hebrew, so I can't say for sure whether this word is: a) used for more general killing, b) used more for killing of animals, or c) a modern invention.
Here's just some of what Linus says about binary modules.
"I'm a complete non-believer in binary modules"
"Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules."
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Oh, and what got Author Bart D. Ehrman interested in this topic? He was raised a Biblical literalist and wanted to read THE definitive earliest copy of the Bible. While the historical truth of the Bible hasn't shaken he's belief in Christianity, he's no longer a literalist.
Of course, tivoisation is an unexpected consequence of the v.2 wording
imho, Stallman's intent has never changed and he's never hidden his intent ... anyone who believes that GPLv.3 is different than v.2 in intent has obviously never read Stallman.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
That is extremely insightful.
It's different, but not all that different really.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
i read this on 4chan a week ago
slashdot fails
And G W Bush has added the following to the US constitution: "6 rolls 2-ply luxury bathroom tissue. 100% recycled paper. Average 240 sheets per roll. Sheet size 110 x 125mm. Total area 13.2m2."
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
How many times were those translated? A whole lot.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Sorry but "thou shalt not murder" is the correct translation. Several web sites go into how this occurred.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
... in Exodus 34, there's a completely different set of commandments.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Huh? When did that change? It's always said "Thou shalt not kill" in my bible.
That's because your Bible is a mistranslation. It is really murder (Hebrew: ratsah), not kill (Hebrew: harag). Legal killing ok, illegal killing (= murder) not ok.
Of course there is then the issue that what you think of as the ten commandments aren't what the Bible calls the ten commandments... See Ten Commandments.
Well, the Hebrew is murder. And there's a HUGE difference between killing and murder; many killings aren't murder (self-defense, for example), and there's a terrible scope problem with a rule that says "Killing is impermissible". In particular, that seems to make vegetarianism compulsory, despite all the rules of Kashrut that say you can kill animals.
But that would be just one more biblical contradiction to add to the list, I guess.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
people have been encouraged to release their s/w and set the license as being "GPL version 2 or later". this means quite a lot of s/w will get automatically "upgraded".
v3 is different enough from v2 that perhaps it should be given a different name, e.g. "Gnu Viral Public License v0.01", and that way people would have to specifically choose to use it, rather than accidentally.
This would solve the problem of bits of linux suddenly being unusable by Suse, redhat etc.
Funny how it ended up translated as "Thou shalt not kill."
Although, from what I understand, that's more from the change in usage of kill from 'murder' to 'end life' that has happened over time.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Woah there, if the point of the ammendment is to be able to resist against an army, then each person must be able to arm themselves at least as well as a standard infantry soldier. Which means assault rifles.
Otherwise the whole thing is pointless.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
A battleship was just about the biggest WMD of the time. Several private owners of ships were involved in freeing this country. Did they turn them over to the state after they won ?
All this because Stallman is opposed to DRM restrictions being included in the GPL.
.. a lesser-known programmer--infamously more obstinate and far more eccentric .. anticorporate crusader .. band of anarchist acolytes .. anticapitalist bent .. a new crusade .. radical group .. socialist crusade .. so reviles .. .. putsch ..
..
.. Orwellian doublespeak .. Stallmanites ..
..
.. hard-core followers .. a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission ..
..
.. Linux zealots have already decided that the case is worthless and that SCO's .. complaint should have been tossed out ages ago"
"Software radical Richard Stallman
"A cantankerous and finger-wagging freewheeler, Stallman won't comment on any of this because he was upset by a previous story written by this writer
"is corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating. His own Web site says Stallman engages in what he calls "rhinophytophilia"--"nasal sex"
".. Stallman's enforcers, such as his sidekick and attorney, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen
"ActiveGrid, an open-source software maker in San Francisco, originally planned to distribute its program under a gpl license but changed plans after a big European bank declared it wouldn't use products covered by the gpl, says Peter Yared, chief executive of ActiveGrid."
What is the name of the bank. Provide a citation to any statements of the bank regarding the GPL.
".. Stallman's suicide-bomber move
Some previous quotes from Lyons on Open Source
"For months, in secret, the Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based group that controls the licensing process for Linux and other "free" programs, has been making threats to Cisco Systems"
"Could SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM actually have merit?
"Mickos is being denounced as a traitor by noisy fanatics in the open source software community because last month he dared to make a deal with SCO Group"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Harag means "to kill" in modern Hebrew and Razzah is "to murder". Fortunately I'm up on my Hebrew :).
the FSF-Eben Moglen relationship is post-GPLv2. Even if he studied its consequences, the v2-wording is not his wording... which is good, because the GPLv2 contains some ugly wording in some places (I always pick the nit at section 0, "...[A], that is to say, ...[B]" where A != B -- which, incidentally, was yanked from v3-draft.)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Yeah, in the KJV, probably one of the most inaccurate translations made thusfar.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
I wasted seven years of my life playing with GNU/Linux. I have lost my family, my relationships, my money, my education, my health, my faith, and more. Do not make the same mistakes I have made. Do not belive the lies and exaggerations. Have a goal, and do not be swept in to Stallman's deception.
"we don't have to deal with unreasonable licensing nonsense .. If somebody wants to take BSD code, modify it and not release those changes, then so be it"
There is nothing in the GPL that prevents you doing the same. You are not compelled to release your own changes. Why not use the Lesser GPL and you can still release your apps without the source code.
"I'd be very happy if Microsoft were to use more BSD code in their products. Doing so would result in a vast increase in the quality of their codebase"
Given that most of the protocols used in their codebase are covered by IP protection you would be in a worse position as costs would have to go back up the pyramed to Microsoft.
was Re:There's always BSD.
davecb5620@gmail.com
What if I depend on BSD-licenced library C and then suddenly that library is re-licenced under the GPL. I'm not distributing Library C with my app, so it's up to the user which version he uses. Now in what situations does the GPL apply to my app? If I'm only supplying binaries and I build against a shared library version of the BSD-licenced version, what happens when the user uses it with a shared library built from the GPLed version?
Contrary to what people believe, Stallman's success isn't due to a fan club, it's due to his contributions. And the success of the GPLv2 isn't due to some ideological fervor, it's because it's a license that works well for many projects.
I have no idea whether GPLv3 will or will not work. Given Stallman's track record, I think there is a good chance it will. But people will accept or reject it based on its merit and utility, not its name or the names of its authors.
As for Forbes itself, there is no reason to believe that people at Forbes have any insight into what matters in the software industry. Their function in life is to report the facts as they are, not to make guesses about the future. Just look at the track record of those publications: they were years late to recognize even the existence of the Internet or open source software, and then they were quite critical of it and predicting gloom and doom (of course, they occasionally also gave opposing views--after all, that way, they can always say they were right).
Ignore the opinions of writers at magazines like Forbes; if these people knew what was going on, they wouldn't earn their living writing for Forbes.
Content companies feel threatened by the fact that they are no longer required to distribute information, including their content. They subsequently invent DRM, an artificial restriction on machines they don't make running software they don't write. It is the historical equivalent of the horse and buggy lobby telling the railroad companies what they can and cannot carry on freight trains. The absurdity and malice of DRM should shock the conscience of anyone who knows anything about technology.
But RMS is the nut for throwing his weight against it?
Only because your bible is a variant on the King James, which was commissioned as a wedding present & the translation was supposed to be beautiful rather than accurate - it's why "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" rather than a "poisoner" or "brewer or poisons" which is a more accurate translation from the Greek.
I believe the official quote is "Thou shalt not kill", but anyway I sort of see your point. God says do not kill, but if you look at the story of Noah, it's God causing a flood and wiping out a whole bunch of people. Kind of a do as I say, not as I do kind of system if you ask me. Same thing with the crusades. The whole time they were preaching about not killing, and a whole lot of killing went on. Oh, and then there's the whole One God commandment, so they made up the whole idea of the holy trinity of 3 entities (God, Jesus, Holy spirit) that are really just 1 god. So that we could still worship Jesus, with really worshiping 2 gods. Jesus was the son of god, but he is also god? Kind of a stretch in logic there.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
To sum up:
The founders respected the individual's god-given right to self-defense, and recognized that government is the biggest threat to individual freedom that could possibly exist.
The political establishment of today does neither.
Slashot confirms: Linux is dying!
I only needed to read the first paragraph of that article or so to realise those people have no idea what they are talking about. Points for this argument: 1. Linux isn't an operating system, it is an operating system kernel. 2. As far as I know there is no such thing as the "Linux movement". 3. Richard "RMS" Stallman doesn't argue that software should be free of charge, but free for peoples freedoms, hence the term "free as in free speech not free as in beer". 4. They make ridiculous accusations that the Free Software Foundation attacks commercial software, when there is nothing wrong with commercial software, it is proprietary software that is targeted, as is made completely clear here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and I quote "Free software does not mean non-commercial. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.". 5. From what I have read, the Linux kernel will be released under GPLv2 with no change in license. Without reading the entire article, it seems this was just a pathetically bigoted, insulting and upsetting attack on RMS, a man who has dedicated his life to helping computer users retain their freedom. So no change to Linux will affect anything regarding the license.
Practically everyone recognizes that, if private individuals are allowed to own fully-automatic AK47s, there will be serious problems enforcing civil order.
z erland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Swit
" it is noted that there are about 420,000 assault rifles stored at private homes, mostly SIG 550 types."
I never hear about any serious problems enforcing civil order in Switzerland.
By earliest copies, I assume you mean the Vaticanus and Sinaticus. Both of these manuscripts were rejected by Erasmus, which wrote the Textus Receptus (what the KJV NT is based on), and the Majority Text also disagrees with these 2 translations. The one was found in the vatican, and another was found by a dumpster at a Monestary, the Sinaticus (one by the dumpster) was marked up so heavily it was hard to read what the content meant.
However, this story is found in the Majority of the texts, which is why it was included in the Erasmus text. What would you rather trust, a couple old manuscripts held by a single entity, or thousands upon thousands of texts held by thousands of thousands of people where the thousands of text agree with each other a strong percentage of the time?
What this text seems to contradict more than the entire bible, is the Westcott and Hort translation, which is the basis for most "modern" bibles, like the NIV.
Now all this aside, the ten commandments are found in the Torah, which Jewish tradition was copied exactly many, many, many times and is arguably the oldest text that is preserved in it's entirety.
Sam
God says do not kill, but if you look at the story of Noah, it's God causing a flood and wiping out a whole bunch of people.
His commandment was "Thou shalt not kill.", not "We won't kill." In Christianity, God may do all the maiming, slaughtering, and killing He desires since He is almighty and infallible. That may be vicious and cold-blooded, and it may be unethical to follow such a belief system, but there is nothing inconsistent or illogical about the religion itself
What about the people's right to overthrow an oppressive ruler, say like George the III. You think that might have been a topic the founders where reflecting on when they wrote this document? I suspect that is exactly why this provision is in the Constitution and is why your interpretation doesn't square with it.
Yeah, I thought about that, and I think the answer is that as long as your app is compatible with the BSD licensed one, and you keep using it for your development, you're fine. But as soon as you use the newer one (bugfix or API change) then you're under the GPL. But it's still a grey area, so maybe as long as your code CAN use the BSD one, then you're okay... We probably won't 'know' until someone actually tries to sue over it, and by then it'll be too late.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The Bible has gone through a lot more revision than some people want to admit. AFAIK from History Channel and such, the original Hebrew word would be better translated as 'murder' rather than 'kill' (not that I am questioning the divinely guided translation of the KJV! please don't murder/kill me for my heresy).
In a similar vein, it seems that the term used for Mary would better be translated as 'young woman', but 'virgin' has that extra zing.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
That's probably the clearest line in the whole Bible, and there's still room for debate and interpretation. No matter how clear something looks to you, there's going to be someone who takes it differently.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
The "Ten Commandments" as they are commonly known was part of a law covenant given =only= to Israel while they were gathered at the foot of Mt Sinai. That law is not binding on Christians or anyone else for that matter, the same way a law banning cell phones in Nth Korea doesn't apply to me where I live. 1500 years later, real Christians were given the guiding principle of "You must love your neighbour as yourself" which encompasses a much wider range of situations.
The strict letter of the law is supposed to be its intent. Things might seem ambiguous today that certainly weren't intended to be ambiguous, but this is a matter of language. The idea of "legalese" is to write in a language that, believe it or not, takes ambiguity out of the question. It's just another attempt to account for the infinite amount of possibilities with the certainty of language, which is ambiguous in nature. There's a reason why pre-law includes logic classes and why logic has its own formal language. Legalese is an attempt to make language that will be clearly followed in a court room, that does not have loopholes. Sure, people take advantage of the language to hide clauses and make legislative loopholes, but that is _not_ the original intent of the language. You can make plain english full of loopholes and hidden crap even more easily if you wanted to.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Haha, well we did arrange a little "accident" with his laptop a while back.
Practically everyone recognizes that, if private individuals are allowed to own fully-automatic AK47s, there will be serious problems enforcing civil order. They were made illegal some time around 1900, but no one could be bothered with amending the Constitution to make such a law possible
The law you are thinking of is the National Firearms Act of 1934. It does not make fully automatic weapons illegal, but rather regulates the possession of certain types of weapons, which includes short barreled (i.e. "sawed off") rifles and shotguns, "destructive devices" (things like hand grenades), firearms suppressors ("silencers") and a category called "any other weapon" (which isn't really "any other weapon" but instead regulates things that don't neatly fall into other categories--items like a gun built into a liquor flask, for example. Also, a very short pump action shotgun that has never been fitted with a shoulder stock would be classified here.)
If you want one, in general all you need to do is pay a $200 tax ($5 for an "any other weapon") and fill out some forms.
In 1986, the congress passed (and Ronald Reagan signed) the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which rolled back some of the excesses of the Gun Control Act of 1968. In this bill was an amendment that made it unlawful to register a machine gun after the date of enactment (May, 1986.) So the pool of legal machine guns is fixed, and prices are high.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
the rulings of Hong Kong's High Court were overridden by the government by appealing to the "intent" of the laws, by asking members of the committee that had drafted them what they had been thinking about. Thus the government is able to retrospectively change the effect of laws without even having to pass legislation.
The problem there wasn't with following intent, the problem was several parts of the government deliberatly and knowingly conspiring to revise history to fit their current agenda. Had the High Court truly cared to get at original intent, it would not simply take the drafting committee's word for their original intent, it would evaluate transcripts of deliberations at that time.
In the U.S. we have the advantage that the framers of the Constitution are now dead and so cannot revise their thinking or intent. We have the problem that there is nobody to stand up and shout "You know very well that's not what we said!".
The problem, as usual, is not that we don't know what was meant by the words in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We know very well what they meant. We have linguists and historians who, if sent back in time to 1776, could fit perfectly into that society with nobody the wiser. Should there be any questions of meaning, they can answer them.
The problem is judges, legislators, and lawyers who are more than happy to argue that black is white and up is down in order to do things that they know very well are forbidden and against the principles of a free society. They do exactly the same thing many of us tried as children "but DAD, you didn't say don't eat cookies before dinner, you said don't let you catch me! MOM caught me, not you!".
As adults, the Supreme Court, President, and Congress are a bit old for spankings, but a good old fashioned tarring and feathering is probably in order. The problem is, due to another bit of legal Sophistry, should I actually try to organize it I would be a "terrorist" and end up in Cuba deprived of many of my Constitutional rights.
Carry on the fight Richard.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
It's all etymological. "Thou shalt not kill" would prevent people from slaughtering animals or throwing away weeds from their gardens. However, you can't "murder" animals (although we vegetarians will tell you otherwise). Even if thou shalt not murder, soldiers don't murder the enemy and executioners don't murder their clients.
It's not as straight forward as it sounds.
... because it's not a waste of bandwidth when part of your audience doesn't have a clue what the joke refers to.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Before you mod me down, hear me out. He got lucky and got some really smart contributors who made what Linux what it is today. Most of you know the source control debacle that happened couple of years back. Everyone told him it was going to happen and he ignored every sane feedback, and went along with the proprietary source control. Got burned. And came back to open source source control. Now he wants to stick with GPL v2, against all conventional wisdom. In couple of years he will get burned, and he will move to GPL v3. He will eventually do that. But it just takes time for him to get burned and move on and realize his mistake. Good thing is that eventually he will realize his mistake own up to it and accept whatever it is.
I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to think twice about complaining about the specialized language of another profession. No one goes to work wanting to use obscure and hard to understand terms. Every odd usage and non intuitive phrase has a reason for existing and most of the time I would be willing to bet that it is a good reason.
The critical difference is that no other industry holds you responsable for your failure to independantly learn their jargon. If you don't know what "facing" is with relation to painting a house, no big deal, it will be explained to you when you hire a painter. If you didn't quite understand and so don't get the result you wanted, it will be fixed. If it's all just too complicated and the painter insists you learn ancient greek to speak to him, you will hire someone else. You are not in any way obligated to hire a $200/hr consultant to translate for you.
Now consider what happens if you agree to add the term "without prejudice" to a contract without understanding exactly what that means.
The Forbes article, other journal articles and conversations on /. show that the kernel is not a problem. The rights are still owned by Linus and he may continue to use GPLv2. There are numerous utilities and apps that we've become accustomed to using, and many of the developers have signed over their rights to FSF, allowing FSF to enforce the terms of the agreement. The problem, if it actually develops, will show up in a case where RMS changes all the utilities and apps to GPLv3. This will mean that when the app or utilities need to be improved, the distro architects wil have to start from the version that was in existence under GPLv2. Theoretically, this could cause some branching, a shortage of programming talent and a glitch in the continued usefulness of many of the programs being offered under GPLv2 at this time. (This includes a LOT more software than just what's associated with GNU/Linux.)
Why does this situation exist? Because one person floating around in a fog of ego and illusion, has the power and authority to be a dog in the manger.
I'm not too worried about it. It's inconvenient if it happens, but I've been developing software for over 40 years and if I really need something I can make it or apply other resources to acquire it. It's simply discouraging to watch all this. It would be an avoidable situation if there was an adult in charge to communicate and design a workable solution. IMO this is not a technical problem, but a personality problem.
You might have a point about "groupthink". I see crowd behavior exhibited on both sides of the debate. RMS has his own little band of groupies that are almost fanatical in supporting him, and the other side (the author of the Forbes article is a case in point) using ad hominem arguments to dismiss the debate out-of-hand. Neither camp is rationally discussing the real merits or deficiencies.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I prefer to reading which doesn't cause G-d to be commanding His people to break the Ten Commandments, personally.
Why? I mean, once you believe in a religion that justifies maiming and killing people you don't like, what difference does a little internal inconsistency make?
It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
Well, thanks for clearing up that it's OK according to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to go out killing people, for example because your ruler decided he wanted more power or more land. I think we need to look no further in order to understand why the Middle East is such a cesspit of violence.
It is "Thou shalt not murder" in the original Hebrew. It never changed.
Either translation of your bible is faulty or you are practising something other than Christianity or Judaism.
Linux doesn't need any help from RMS to sputter out. The infighting, the backstabbing, the politics and of course the inability to even agree on a license all contribute to the public perception of Linux as the sole province of socially retarded geeks and nerds. Add to that the constant microsoft bashing (yeah, they suck, we know. What do YOU have to offer instead? Tell me THAT rather than simply bashing the competition!) and you've got a WINNING package.
Linux will die off on its own with 'friends' like you 'helping' it along. Grow up, would you? Learn how to play nicely with one another and maybe others will take you seriously for once.
Murder, though, is unjustified killing. It breaks one of the Ten Commandments to pick a child at random and bash his head in. It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
What is the difference between killing a child at random and then killing a child just because he was born under the wrong people? (aka your enemy)
Secondly, why does an all powerful yet loving god, need his chosen people to go out and kill people?
If he was all powerful, wouldn't he just drop the proverbial holy smackdown from orbit or disaster?
Not to mention the loving part...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If you've ever met Richard Stallman you would understand just how irrelevant he's become. True he started the movement that lead to FOSS & Linux, but in the end he isn't the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds is and if Linus says no to GPL#3 then Linux wont go there. This isn't the first time projects have forked due to philosophical differences and it won't be the last. Stallman is trying to set free the Linux community from a contract it (the community) likes and has used successfully to make in-roads in the IT community at large. While I understand the DRM issues that Stallman is pushing for the GPL rewrite and agree that many times draconian DRM is used to stifle competition, the idea that one person has total control of what has been purported as being a free and open source for software in the end becomes just as Draconian as the Draconian abusers of DRM in the first place. If we are to see FOSS grow into its full potential then we need to embrace that there are people who will want to pick and choose which GPL 2 or 3 that they can license their works under. And remember that freedom of that choice will benefit the entire FOSS community as a whole. By embracing the concept of choice to the end user and the content and software creators as a community, you offer them the freedom of choice. That is what FOSS is all about. Freedom
Well, now you know how they make the holes for swiss cheese.
You're padding the Windows list with things like "wait for it to arrive" when most people buy from a store.
If you're going to include padding like buying the CD, why not include the time for installing and configuring Linux in its list? Windows comes pre-installed and pre-configured on its machines, after all.
"Sufferin' succotash."
If all killing were outlawed, there'd be a heck of a lot of contradiction here.
Um, there *is* a heck of a lot of contradiction there.
Let's see:
;)
Ten commandments?
I'm not religious, but...
"Thou shalt not murder"
Is pretty clear to me. Although apparently it wasn't to Christianity. Then again this wasn't an issue of not being clear rather than the people this is and was addressed to, putting their fingers in their ears and singing "LA LA LA LA LA LA I can't hear you LA LA LA!!"...
Um, you forget that most believers only take that to apply to followers of their sect of the religion. Remember it culturally reads thou shalt not murder other Jews. Christains mentally changed it to thou shalt not murder other Christains. Its only modern day liberals and revisionist Christains that are going back and saying it means thou shalt not kill any other human. If you really want to nit-picky some Christains will just say that the entire ten commandments is outdated by the new testament and doesn't have to be followed since it is the "old law." Trust me; they can have their cake and eat it too. The old testament ten commandments is something that is thrown around alot mainly because its the only part of the Bible that Christains actually bother to pound into their young and it sometimes sticks. Most of the other stuff is forgotten, but that the ten commandments is supposed to be important cause we learned that when we were little is remembered. I was raised as a Christian and not really a follower. That's just how alot of people think. Heck, folks that don't really care for Christianity don't really mind the ten commandments once you strike out that first one about god and culturally update a few others. Basically most folks just don't mind living by them most of the time. That's why you'll hear a big up roar about them even if those shouting don't really follow any of the other parts of the Bible. It's sort of like picking out the top ten laws that you'll obey and then disreguarding the rest of the criminal code because no one on this Earth would really call you on it.
One thing to note: in the 18th century, "infringed", as in, "shall not be infringed", had a meaning closer to "eliminated" or "voided". Today, by contrast, we say a right is being "infringed", when any restriction is added to it. (That is, when it's violated "at the fringes".) But the 2nd amendment only keeps it from being voided, not from being partially restricted. In fairness, of course, a) it probably never occurred to the Framers that someone would want to put partial restrictions on the RTKBA, so a prohibition on voiding the right was probably not crafted to allow partial restrictions and b) whether or not governments should recognize a RTKBA, immune from legislation of a simple majority, has nothing to do with the wording of the US's constitution.
But it's just something to think about.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yes, perhaps it should be adjusted for inflation and rounded nicely. According to Tom's Inflation Calculator - the nicer rounded # would be $1,000. Which would make more sense - but I still think the cost of a jury would even overwhelm $1,000.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Ok, Fine. What counts as arms? a .22 pistol? A tank? A basement full of C-4? An F16? and what counts as a citizen of good standing? Someone who hasn't been convicted of a felony? Someone who has no criminal record? Does this include traffic violations? Even your clarifications must be further clarified. It's a never ending cycle that can never be fully codified.
Let's see for a really well-rounded infantry person you'd need machine guns for killing other soliders. Today you have tanks, airplanes and helicopters. We have infantry weapons that target each of those weapons platforms. I have very mixed feeling about having anti-tank, anti-airplane, anti-helicopter weapons in private citizen's hands no matter how well regulated. I wouldn't want any arty to be in included. I'd have to look it up, but mortars are really susposed to be the quick and easy arty so I could see some arguing for them to be infantry weapons. Arty doesn't need to be in civilian hands. I'd say that the raw fire power that it takes for anti-tank, anti-airplane, or anti-helicopter weapons would make them just as destructive as arty if aimed at ground targets. I've always read well-regulated to mean having a list of rules and to follow to be properly licensed. Heck, I wouldn't really worry if we had properly licensed former professionals out there with these weapons, but after 9/11 that ain't ever going to happen. I'm less afraid of my government using heavy weapons on me than I am about random other citizens trying out and using heavy weapons. I'd much rather that remained a military only thing just for my peace of mind. If I ever really need to know or have access to that kinda of hardware, the government would draft me, train me and issue me a set of my very own heavy weapons. I don't see the need for needing or paying for that expense for an ordinary citizen.
I'd rather have 12 foot walls around my property than an fully automatic machine gun.
For anyone interested, on my blog: http://btetc.blogspot.com/2006/10/some-questions-o f-narrative.html
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
BSD Unix: *Really* free software.
The original hebrew is translated as "Thou shall not murder" and is understood by both Jews and (most) Christians to not include the killing of animals, or the killing of men in self-defense, or justifiable homicide or excusable homicie, or homicide by the State. The translation in the King James version is inaccurate and leads to confusion. Check out http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/001102_Thou ShaltNotMurder.html for more details.
If you read TFA, you would know that rms is "a cantankerous and finger-wagging freewheeler" who has spent decades getting in the way of everyone doing their work, by forcing them (I forgot how) to GPL their output. And also you would know that he is now going to "slap the new restraints on the big tech vendors he so reviles" by making them use GPL 3. I forgot why the vendors he reviles are using the GPLv2...
...meh. I decided not to keep going with this. Friends, please express your displeasure to Forbes Magazine rather than slashdot
You claim that he is an eminently practical man when TFA clearly states that he is "corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating." Wouldn't an eminently practicaly man want to keep those strands of hair?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Why bother? If a law doesn't work for the next generation, then they can change it. The problem with constitutions is that you end up being ruled by dead people. And as smart as those people were, they can't adapt to the problems of a more modern age. Because they are dead.
America has this puritanical streak that seems to permeate its politics. You worship your constitution the same as you worship the bible. The constitution was written to last about 25 years, after which there would be a constitutional convention to reassess it and rewrite whatever needed to be rewritten. The constitution isn't well understood 10 generations later because it was only meant to last for one generation. The way Americans worship this document written by slave owners over 200 years ago is a sickness.
Why the hell does anyone care what some people who have been dead 200 years thought about gun control? Isn't it more important what we think about gun control?
This is so typical of slashdot. I tried to skim read the comments to get a sense of the discussion, and I come across this. I'm not even going to bother trying to imagine how we got from Richard Stallman and GPL3 to the Torah and killing. I think I'll move along now.
Funny,
I thought I learned that Christianity had an oral tradition for sharing the Bible, due to persecution from the Romans...
I guess that pretty much sums up your point; but saying that the story of the stoning wasn't in the earliest copies misses the point a bit, if the "source of truth" came from naration, and not from what was written down.
Maybe everyone will have to switch to the BSD license. Take that, trolls: BSD is not going to die! :)
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
The one was found in the vatican, and another was found by a dumpster at a Monestary
Wow. I had no idea the Dumpster® had been around that long.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
The translation literally reads:
Thou shalt not commit unlawful murder.
Still, your main point is agreed with.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
The problem there wasn't with following intent, the problem was several parts of the government deliberatly and knowingly conspiring to revise historyP You'll notice I wrote "intent" in quotemarks for that reason.
I've been finding the installation process simpler for Linux distros for years. Installing Windows is a crazed festival of rebooting for drivers, system utilities, so forth. I'd rather edit a text file here and there than go through all that babysitting.
"How many other such documents have stayed around and had to be altered so little for such a long time? "
Um, I think you're forgetting how many amendments there are. Some of them are pretty major.
And 220 years isn't a long time either, you very probably know someone who knew someone who knew someone who was alive at the time.
> Ten commandments?
The Egyptians had them first, in the "Egyptian Book of the Dead", Spell 125
1. BotD
2. BotD
> Is pretty clear to me. Although apparently it wasn't to Christianity.
The exact Hebrew in Ex 20:13 for "murder" is "lo tirtzach" (It is derived from H#7523 ratzach / ratsach.) Dr. Reuben Alcalay's (modern Hebrew Scholar) Complete Hebrew/English Dictionary says that the word tirtzach, especially in classical Hebrew usage, refers to "any kind of killing," and not necessarily the murder of a human being.
Aside: If God is a God of Love, why isn't he contradictory and a hypocrite for commanding to kill every man, woman, and child in Ex 32:27 or 1. Sam 15:2?
--
What did Paul hear, that he was not allowed to tell others when he had his OBE in 2 Cor 12:4
Or, try a current distro. On Fedora Core 5, running GnuCash is as complicated as "yum install gnucash". WINE requires mastery of "yum install wine". It's highly technical, so be sure to have a trained professional nearby in case you have problems. (rolls eyes)
You are not the customer.
http://qdb.us/70623
:/
Heh...
It depends on the translation. Don't take my word for it, but I belive the word 'murder' is probably a more acurate translation.
Huh? When did that change? It's always said "Thou shalt not kill" in my bible.
Because someone is trying to twist it so as to exclude the death penalty or other ways of killing people that are deemed "acceptable."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
imho, Stallman's intent has never changed and he's never hidden his intent ... anyone who believes that GPLv.3 is different than v.2 in intent has obviously never read Stallman.
I disagree. If Stallman has always felt the same way, and never tried to deceive anyone else about how he feels, then why did he change the name of the 'Library GPL' to the 'Lesser GPL'? Why does he encourage people to use the LGPL in order to popularise their libraries, and then switch to the GPL to force anyone using them to either adopt the GPL or deal with rewriting their code to use different libraries?
Stallman's aims are pretty clear if you've read up on him, but he's also a rather devious character, and I wouldn't put it past him to do the same sort of scheming with his licence as he suggestes library developers do with the LGPL-to-GPL switch. I don't think he's ever changed is ideals or aims, but I do think he's perfectly willing to deceive others for the 'greater good' as he sees it (i.e. to promote his ideology).
I prefer to reading which doesn't cause G-d to be commanding His people to break the Ten Commandments, personally.
Yeah, we all would, but the Old Testament shows a petty and vindictive god. For instance, He orders His people to kill every living thing at the Battle of Jerhico. We have a word for that. It's "war crime."
Now in all fairness some of the atrocities that are glorified in the OT aren'tactually ordered, by God, but rather his prohets. Specifically, I'm thinking about how Moses orders all the Midianite men killed, and upon learning that the women and children were spared, orders all the boys and non-virgin women and girls killed.
Classy.
Some "spurious claims"? Actually, as far as I know, there is no consensus on whether the Wright Brothers were the first to build a heavier-than-air flying machine.
For some of the claims disputing it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine
So, in the bible, it says don't eat swine, aka pig. No bacon, no ham, no porkchops. Yet, Christians eat pork.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
About halfway down the list, I realised this sounds a great deal like a goa'uld exhorting his faithful Jaffa...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You were taught wrong.
The authors of two out of four gospels (Mark and Luke) were not eye-witnesses of what they wrote, and so they probably got what they wrote orally from the apostles, but aside from that, the new testament is not an oral tradition at all.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
That text was written in Hebrew, not Greek.
Furthermore, I think you are wrong or misinformed.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
While I agree with your point about constitutions becoming outdated and such, the rationale behind a perpetual, overriding document of law is to avoid the law become whatever-the-hell-the-masses-of-today want. It's to avoid the tyranny of the majority by restricting what the masses can do to the minority.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
While I agree with your point about constitutions becoming outdated and such, the rationale behind a perpetual, overriding document of law is to avoid the law become whatever-the-hell-the-masses-of-today want. It's to avoid the tyranny of the majority by restricting what the masses can do to the minority.
fscking wrong button clicking grr... I meant to add this:
If the masses can just change their own restrictions on a whim, then there are no effective restrictions. Then again, those restrictions only exist because the masses have faith in this piece of paper that says that doing certain things is wrong. So maybe the tyranny of the majority is inevitable, and the best we can hope for is a benevolent tyranny.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Your comment seems rather obtuse to me as I have never seen a murderer with earmuffs singing "LALALALALA" while stabbing someone to death or shooting them in the face. Not even metaphorically.
Howerver I can only assume you are referring to those hot button categories of action (like wartime killing and capitol murder) that so many people point to and scream "hipocrisy!" about.
Fortunately the Bible is one of the most precise documents ever written and it makes clear the distinction between murder and other types of justifiable and necessary homocide. Anyone who reads the 10 commandments in context will understand this, as the scriptural discussion of what constitutes murder is voluminous and pretty hard to miss, even if you are trying.
The Bible dictates that self defense, wartime, and the excercise of the law are not only permissible reasons for homocide but in some cases they are required. So unless you are referring to Christians who routinely kill humans outside those boundaries I think you may be doing a little singing yourself.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
It depends on where you look, the original is in Hebrew (being part of the old testiment), a vast number of the translations used later were in Greek, Latin, and in some instances Aramaic.
I'm not a bible scholar, but I do know a few, and all agree that KJ is not an accurate translation - reguardless of whether the original language was Latin, Greek, or Hebrew.
Still, it's pretty clear that the Pentateuch was originally written in Hebrew, and that the Greek and Latin (and Early Modern English) were derived from it, directly or indirectly, not the other way around.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Yes, the original for that passage was in Hebrew. The origin for the NT is primarily Greek & Latin. In no case, is the KJ version considered to be a linguisticly accurate translation.
Well reading Forbes is very similar to ready the Pradva in the 70s/80s.
It says what the "power that are" want.
So you can translate the article into: "We who get into Forbes what we want do not like the GPLv3.
GPLv2 was bad enough we could not steal those wacko artists work, but v3 is even worse we cannot force them to play with our rules.
No Patents, No DRMs comme on, how do we create cushy monopols then ?"
Now will the v3 be important, I do not know, after all there is still quite a lot of MIT/BSDish licences floating around.
What is interesting is that even if Gnu/Linux would stay under v2 it gives an option, and if for instance patents or DRM would threaten Gnu/linux it would be possible to just find half a dozen key package maintainer, and get them to agree to release their package under v3, and then the "linux businesses" whould have to evaluate their options between "doing the right thing" or forking out large amount of money to go back to v2 alternative of what escaped.
So I doubt that RMS will become "irrelevant" RNS.
Wow.
We were discussing the meaning of a particular passage in the old testament: Ex 22:18. Your statements, while factually correct, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what was being discussed on this thread.
We weren't discussing the NT at all (and btw, it's all Greek. The Latin NT is a translation from the Greek, and KJV is a translation from the Latin).
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
*sigh* Leave it to that blow-head to use the metric system...
Um, you forget that most believers only take that to apply to followers of their sect of the religion.
Check out Deuteronomy, chapter 13, where Moses specifically instructs his followers to kill anyone who suggests worshipping a different God, even friends and family. Be careful not to argue with any fundamentalists -- their infallible Bible commands them to stone you to death!
as of a week ago. Care to tell me how he's running x86 only binary modules from ATi and Nvidia one one of those ? I don't think quoting somebody's statements are a game. You might want to claim it is because I've shown evidence that your statements are incorrect, but that's just a diversionary tactic. Where are your quotes by the way with matching URLs ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
But to attack your exact claim, "Thou shalt not murder" is more commonly translated as "Thou shalt not kill", a much broader prohibition.
There's lots of disagreement about what the ten commandments mean, and even more about whether or not they're actually good. Hardly the result of clear and careful thought in their construction.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The claim was "clearly and expertly drafted." Another several hundred years of experience added considerably to the expertise.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I'm impressed! He recognised the value of the metric system :-)
Actually, it's much more predictable, and thus much more just. Trying to read undocumented "intent" into a law is a dangerous invitation to arbitrary enforcement, a hallmark of tyranny. Reading in "intent" makes law more subject to popular whim, which is more democratic: not a good thing.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Hmm.. you have to be careful not to let patriotic, America-centric sentiments get in the way of being objective :)
They are either right next to Joseph Smiths "golden plates" or in some nameless, vast government warehouse.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That doesn't mean their right to do so was protected by Amendment II.
Of course that's what they wanted. One of the first significant things the new federal government organized under the Constitution did was go suppress a rebellion.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
you are correct,
fact:
if slavery was not illegal it would be still in active practise.
(adding to this, slavery is not 'just' an american issue, it existed long before europeans came to America and about everywhere.)
Forbes Magazine subscriptions are great Xmas gifts. For the competitors' CEOs and CIOs. Getting technology right is the difference between corporate profit and corporate disaster, and Forbes usually gets it wrong
Tech Public Policy stuff
Not "popular whim". The whim of the government. Which may be populist, or may not. As I said, in Hong Kong this method has been used in decidedly undemocratic, and unpopular with the general public, ways.
yes, but do i *really* want that rootkit?
" it is noted that there are about 420,000 assault rifles stored at private homes, mostly SIG 550 types."
I never hear about any serious problems enforcing civil order in Switzerland.
True. However Switzerland also has compulsory military service for all citizens. And, compulsory gun ownership by all citizens who have completed military service. So you KNOW that everyone has a gun, and hence you have no particular advantage.
The problem with gun ownership in the United States of America is not that some people own assault rifles, but rather that many do not. And even if they did, would not be able to fire them.
Switzerland proves 'Single Gun Theory', but try forcing the Amish or Bay Area hippies into military service and you'll never hear the end of the whining about facism and such.
What most Americans fail to understand, is that the American socio/political system is deliberately designed to be imperfect, thus allowing freedom of choice.
- Nothing to see hear.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I suppose it depends on how you (and God, and Moses) define "murder". It's not the same as "kill", of course. Some killing is murder, and some isn't.
Sadly, I don't think any of the myriad other religions (including the non-theistic ones) have done much better. As another part of the Bible notes, we all fall short of the Glory.
I wouldn't really call it compulsory military service, it's more like compulsory military training. Nobody is being sent into battle, they're just being trained on the proper use of weapons.
It probably wouldn't bother the Amish, since it would teach them hunting skills. And, the hippies, at least the men, would quickly change their minds after they realize how fun it is to shoot a gun.
Besides, Switzerland also has a civilian service for those opposed to the military.
Um, you forget that most believers only take that to apply to followers of their sect of the religion.
Check out Deuteronomy, chapter 13, where Moses specifically instructs his followers to kill anyone who suggests worshipping a different God, even friends and family. Be careful not to argue with any fundamentalists -- their infallible Bible commands them to stone you to death!
I'd have to look up that, but that would involve actually looking through the Bible, which I try to avoid. I'd buy it though. Remember, I stated it applied only to members of the sect. Those that even thought about worshiping other gods weren't part of the sect though really that was more against the first law of only their god. Once you have a "law" you have a community death penalty. Really thinking about it, I sometimes wonder if it would be a good or bad idea to bring back public stoning as a death sentence. The key part that I'm thinking about is that many members of the society/community that want those sorts of actions gone from their community would throw a stone and maybe get something out of their system while actually feeling like they did their part in the court process. There wouldn't be nearly the urge to question rather or not a sentence was correct if most of the local community had to actually administer the punishment. They'd feel some collective guilt if there was any real doubt that they stoned some one that may have been why we quit doing that form of punishment though.
Many self confessed Christians will point to obscure Bible translation issues to ensure that they can kill somebody else when it suits them (the current war in Iraq is a shinning example of this. All the US leadership calls itself religious, mostly Cristian, but they have no qualms ordering the assasination of hundreds of thousends of innocent people)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... then god's communications skills are sorely lacking ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... not murder.
If this is the best god, the all powerfull been,could do when communicating his, sorry, its will, lets say that a communications expert is sorely needed to give it a helping hand.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
No ambiguites for Spanish speaking folk.
Which I think adheres to the spirit of Jesus message.
But I am an atheist, so I just laugh at religious people from the sidelines.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And that is most Christians.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
just lazy. ;-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'm assuming you are from the USA since that is where DRM is a major issue. I thought that Moby Dick by Herman Melville was required reading in schools there - it contains paragraphs and even one sentance over a page in length. While my writing will never reach that quality and mostly looks like crap due to misusing a tag and not previewing, I do not believe there is any excuse to reply to a short post without bothering to read it - it is simply rude behaviour.
To sum up the earlier post: I disagree with the sales version of the term "operating system" and RMS adopting this definition for the purpose of promoting his project as well.
> but after all, legal rulings are often called "opinions". Why does there need to be "interpretation"?
There is an excellent discussion of this point in the SF novel "Bug Park" by James Hogan. I don't have it here, so I can't point to pages, but the gist is that management and law are similar in that policies that are unclear at one level are booted up to the next level for a higher-level manager to decide on, and the resulting role of precedent in the law.
Worth reading the book for that discussion, plus it's an excellent story with a couple of kewl plot twists.
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. -- Sir Winston Churchill
Oh, you need the new edition George W. Bush Bible then.
It says "Thou shalt not kill*
*Non-Americans and Democrats excepted."
Btw, in modern Israeli law, "Retzhakh" is Murder and "Harigah" is Manslaughter.
This is not true, at least according to orthodox Jewish thought. In fact, it is widely acknowledged that while the Torah is the holiest text on earth, it is also very vague, which leads to many interpretations. If it was so simple and clear-cut, there would be no reason for the Gemmarah and the Mishnah to exist, and there would be no Talmudic scholars.
Bullshit, that sentence makes no sense, its just a bunch of setence fragments slammed together, Contradictory statements, see just running on, without end, just like this sentence! Reminds me of people who say the bible is wonderful poetry. There are a few small sections that are amazing, but 99% of it is worse than poetry written by teenage girls.
1) Written words do not really have intent. People have intent. If two people say the same thing, they may have different intent. When you have a large group (Congress) agreeing to say x words, then you have a whole bunch of DIFFERENT intents. Sometimes those disents are contradictory. Part of the art of getting a law passed is to write one that can satisfy different intents. You want more explicitid stuff, but that would have made it harder, if not IMPOSSIBLE to get approved. A key example are the words about religious freedom. Some people voted it in to prevent the government from stopping people from praying. Others voted it in to prevent the government from forcing people to pray.
2) Progress happens. Things change. We have to INTEREPRET the old ideas to see how they should apply to the new things. When the bill of rights was created, weapons did NOT include fully automatic weapons. At the time, a Wooden masted battle ship was the best weapon available. Not a single one of the framers of the consittion would have claimed that the 2nd ammendment let you own a wooden battle ship and dock it on the potomoac near the white house. A modern machine gun has more firepower, yet some fools say the 2nd amendment lets you carry one on the street right outside the white house.
3) People make mistakes. At one point a majority of people thought some 'races' were inferior, not entitled to the 'inalieanable rights'. When we realized we were wrong, we did NOT have to re-write the entire constition. Instead we simply applied the correct, new understanding of what we had already written.
It is for these three reases that we need to interpret the laws, not simply read them. The heart of all laws are the principle behind them, NOT the intent of the writer. We must shift through the words for the basic principles that all agreed on, not simply what some (but not all) intended. We must apply old principles to new ideas. And we must apply those principles to our CURRENT understanding of the world, ignoring the mistakes that our ancestors may have made, out of respect for the wisdom of the things they got right.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Still, it's pretty clear that the Pentateuch was originally written in Hebrew, and that the Greek and Latin (and Early Modern English) were derived from it
While that is true, the earliest complete copy (even of the Pentateuch let alone the entire OT) of the Hebrew we have, dates from around the year 1000, whereas the Septuagint (ie the original Greek translation), dates from somewhere in the first three centuries before Christ.
By comparing passages from ancient Hebrew texts (dead sea scrolls) we can see that occasionally at least the Greek is a more accurate rendition than the Masoretic text. In this particular instance, of course, it would pay to know what the Hebrew as well as the Greek say.
In any case, whether your translation says 'kill' or 'murder,' and indeed whether the same distinction between ratsah and harag was drawn in classical biblical Hebrew as it is in modern Hebrew, it is clear from context (ie. because the Pentateuch so often prescribes a capital sentence for transgressions and because YHVH commanded His people to exterminate the indigenous people of Canaan), that the commandment only has unlawful killing in mind and not killing per se.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke